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Virtual museum

The choice of a museum

The idea of organising a virtual museum for FERROVIENORD stemmed from the awareness that the railway is itself a heritage, a dynamic set of infrastructures, trains and timetables, of initiatives for the development of the territory and the economy, as well as a rich store of experiences of the often unseen people involved.
The idea of organising a virtual museum for FERROVIENORD stemmed from the awareness that the railway is itself a heritage, a dynamic set of infrastructures, trains and timetables, of initiatives for the development of the territory and the economy, as well as a rich store of experiences of the often unseen people involved. 
The wish to extend the accessibility of a railway museum to a broader audience than the people living in the area covered by the railway, and to intercept people and travellers from farther afield, led us to a solution based on a “virtual reality” project.

FERROVIENORD really is a dynamic living heritage, with a rich local history of nearly 150 years. To be fully understood, it needs to find and rearrange every element built and left by the people involved in developing the infrastructure, running the trains, researching innovative ways to organise transport, be they trains or technologies at the service of the infrastructure and passengers.
FERROVIENORD itself is, and has been, a transport organisation made up of places, tracks, stations, coaches, trucks and engines. The railway is at the service of passengers, but it is also at the service of the territory and its residents.

The railway not only creates occasions for historical and cultural events for many generations, it also lives in step with the times, often leading society towards the future and progress. FERROVIENORD has run services for passengers engaged in seasonal tourism, but above all it serves passengers who used and use it on a daily basis for work and school in what today is a highly urbanised area, whose development has been driven in part by the railway itself. Indeed, the territory it covers represents the actual history of the railway. The railway has fuelled the creation of work organisation models to which it has gradually adapted in order to offer an up-the-minute response to the changing needs of people and institutions. 

The people who use the railway today, and specifically the train services on the FERROVIENORD network, want punctuality, but, above all, they want guaranteed mobility providing coverage and frequency to ensure rapid interaction with other means of transport: underground railways, buses, airport services.
The possibility to guarantee all this is essentially due to the ability demonstrated by FERROVIENORD over 150 years of history to meet the needs of residents in the area and to anticipate the requirements of the future.
Ferrovie Nord Milano was in fact set up in response to the industrial evolution of the main European cities and also to the developments of Italy’s main national railway.
But FERROVIENORD was also the first Italian network to implement a rapid airport link, with Malpensa international airport. Thanks to the far-sighted thinking behind this link, FERROVIENORD has experienced periods of growth that otherwise would not have been possible. It was also the first regional network to comply with the requirements of the European transport and safety standards.

So the story we want to illustrate starts from the original railway line projects and the first train services organised in three different classes, to cater for the needs of people travelling daily for the jobs often created as a result of the great waves of migration from southern to northern Italy, and to respond to the fashion among the Milanese and Lombardy middle classes to holiday in the lakes and tourist resorts in the Lombardy pre-Alps by providing a faster mode of travel than horse-drawn carriages.

The museum will also illustrate the projects for the early development of the network, as well as the work undertaken to modernise and upgrade the railway system, which, in the past, here as in many areas of Italy and Europe, experienced something of a decline as the world changed to meet the new needs of the post-industrial society. The projects introducing the new systems of transport in the Lombardy metropolitan area, trains and travel... will then take us to this virtual journey in and through FERROVIENORD, a virtual journey that over time, like all journeys, will evolve and become richer step by step, sleeper by sleeper, train by train...

All visitors will be most welcome on board this journey, as will everyone who, through their contributions, joins us on an important form of crowd-working, the symbol of a permanent railway intended for everyone: railway workers and passengers. 

Giovanni Cappellari