The use of railways for urban mobility is not new, but only up to few years ago it was on dedicated networks and it was present only in main metropolitan areas (German S-Bahn, Paris RER).
Only in recent years more suitable solutions to medium size urban areas with an integration between extra-urban and urban rail transports have been developed: tram-trains represent the most significant experiences.
The objectives of this paper are firstly to describe the characteristics of the tram-train, from the technological and from the operational view point, underlining the problems faced in its development and the adopted solutions, then to present the most significant experiences all over the world, finally to analyse the state of art of the research and the possible further developments of this transport system in the next years. |
