Infrastructure, housing and the shape of the region

TILO and the cross-border railway

The daily movement of almost eighty thousand commuters has long been carried mainly by private cars. The border crossings at Chiasso-Brogeda, Stabio, Ponte Tresa and Gaggiolo are among the most congested points of the Swiss road network at peak hours.¹ Public transport has gained ground since the founding of TILO (Treni Regionali Ticino Lombardia) in June 2004. The company has its seat in Bellinzona and a share capital of CHF 2 million, held in equal parts by the Swiss Federal Railways and the Lombard railway company Trenord. At the end of 2025 it had 201 employees and a fleet of 53 multi-voltage Flirt trains that run from the Swiss into the Italian network without stopping at the border to change locomotives. It operates seven lines, S10, S20, S30, S40, S50, S90 and the RegioExpress RE80 to Milan, and in 2025 it ran 7.8 million train kilometres and carried 25 million passengers.² When TILO celebrated its twentieth anniversary in December 2024, the president of its board, Marco Piuri, called the service a "fundamental" link between the strategic points of the two regions.³

The decisive extension of the network was the railway between Mendrisio and Varese. The Swiss section between Mendrisio and Stabio opened to passenger trains first, in December 2014. The new cross-border section between Stabio and Arcisate, only 3.6 kilometres long, was finished more than three years later than the Swiss works, because administrative and environmental problems, accidents on the construction site and a change of contractor slowed the Italian works. The line was officially inaugurated in December 2017 in the presence of the Italian Minister of Infrastructure, Graziano Delrio. Regular service began on 7 January 2018.⁴ In February 2018 about 1,600 passengers crossed the border on the line each day, and by January 2020 the number at Stabio had almost doubled to about 3,150. From June 2018 the S40 was extended every two hours to Malpensa airport, and by late 2019 the lines S40 and S50 between Ticino and Malpensa carried about 8,000 passengers a day on the Italian side.⁵ The Mendrisio–Varese line thus fulfilled, more than twenty years later, one of the projects that the Regio Insubrica had promoted since its founding.

The national rail axis complements the regional network. The Gotthard base tunnel opened in 2016 and the Ceneri base tunnel was inaugurated on 4 September 2020 and brought into commercial service on 13 December 2020, completing the New Rail Link through the Alps (Chapter C.III).⁶ The tunnels shortened the journey between Zurich and Lugano to less than two hours and made Lugano, Bellinzona and Locarno a single labour market. For the Insubric region the important effect is that the same infrastructure also serves the Rotterdam–Genoa freight corridor and the passenger connection to Milan. Its full potential depends also on the capacity of the Italian access lines south of Chiasso.⁷

Notes

Traffic volumes at the border crossings (Federal Roads Office). ↩
TILO, "Dati e fatti", https://www.tilo.ch/chi-siamo/dati-e-fatti-tilo-new.html. ↩
TILO, press release "TILO: 20 anni con te", 5 December 2024, https://tilo.ch/dam/jcr:6068b5cc-7f84-44e2-b431-288f903b99e8/241205_TILO%2020%20anni%20con%20te.pdf. ↩
"Compie tre anni la ferrovia Lugano–Varese", Varesenews, January 2021, https://www.varesenews.it/2021/01/compie-3-anni-la-ferrovia-lugano-varese/1293076/?output=pdf (inauguration with Minister Delrio in December 2017, service from 7 January 2018). Opening of Mendrisio–Stabio in December 2014: Wikipedia, "Mendrisio–Varese railway", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mendrisio%E2%80%93Varese_railway; length of 3.6 km, causes of delay, change of contractor from Salini to Salcef and delay of more than three years: Wikipedia, "Ferrovia Mendrisio-Varese", https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferrovia_Mendrisio-Varese. Wikipedia is used here as a last resort. ↩
Ibid. ↩
Federal Office of Transport, SBB and AlpTransit Gotthard AG, "Cerimonia di inaugurazione del Ceneri nel 2020", 29 August 2019, https://www.newsd.admin.ch/newsd/message/attachments/58206.pdf. ↩
Ticino Turismo, "La nuova ferrovia transalpina (NFTA)", https://www.ticino.ch/it/campaigns/alptransit.html ("Zurigo–Lugano in meno di due ore"; Bellinzona–Lugano about 15 minutes, Locarno–Lugano about 30 minutes); see Chapter C.III. The remark on the Italian access lines is the author's assessment. ↩

For general information only. This article does not constitute legal or tax advice, does not replace advice on an individual case and creates no lawyer-client relationship. It reflects the legal position as of August 2025.

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Infrastructure, housing and the shape of the region

TILO and the cross-border railway

Notes

Setting up or expanding in Switzerland?