Fast, Slow, Crossover Railways: Technological Scenario for the Reuse of Abandoned Railways

This paper looks at the new scenarios unfolding in policies for the recovery and reuse of abandoned railways. It examines the role of technological innovations that permit rail corridors to be reconsidered in relation to a logic of reactivating residual functions and harmoniously recomposing the coherence between the use of resources, building techniques and user behaviour. The resulting model moves beyond the opposition between fast and slow, to date adopted in the recovery of decommissioned railways, to identify an alternative philosophy of crossover intervention. This modality for intervening in existing conditions avoids the improbable and costly integral dismantling of rail lines and reactivates networks of hard and soft components to create a socially and ecologically resilient infrastructure. An infrastructure that responds in a reversible and effective manner to the multiple and changing needs of collective transport, while also triggering a more general requalification of the territories and settlements crossed.