Hydrogen trains have spent the last few years quietly collecting first-in-the-country headlines. Germany put the world’s first fuel-cell passenger train into regular service back in 2018, and the idea has since crept into a small group of countries willing to bet on a fuel whose only tailpipe output is water vapor. Italy is now lining up to join them, with a fuel-cell trainset built to take over a non-electrified alpine line in Lombardy that diesel locomotives have worked for decades. The wrinkle is that the train is already more than a year behind schedule, and the company that built it spent the back half of 2025 telling the rail press it was pulling back from new hydrogen programs. So the milestone is real, but it arrives wrapped in a messier story than the brochure suggests.<\/p>\n
The train is Alstom’s Coradia Stream H, a single-deck regional set that carries around 240 passengers and is rated for more than 600 km (over 370 miles) of range on a tank of hydrogen. It will run on the Brescia\u2013Iseo\u2013Edolo line, a roughly 103-km (64-mile) route through the Valcamonica, an alpine valley northeast of Milan that also happens to be a UNESCO World Heritage site. The line is not electrified, which is exactly why it still runs on diesel and exactly why it works as a hydrogen testbed. Stringing catenary through 28 tunnels and 500 meters of elevation change is the kind of project that makes a fuel-cell train look reasonable by comparison.<\/p>\n
The route is operated by Trenord, with infrastructure managed by FerrovieNord, both part of the FNM group behind the whole project. Lombardy has ordered 14 of these trains to replace the entire diesel fleet on the line, and according to the regional government the first seven are due in service by June 30, 2026, with the rest following over the months after. The line was also billed as a gateway toward the Milano-Cortina 2026 Winter Olympics, which gave the project a very public deadline it ended up missing, since the Games came and went in February with diesel still on the tracks.<\/p>\n
A hydrogen train is useless without somewhere to refuel it, which is why most of the money here went into the ground rather than into rolling stock. The H2iseO project carries a budget of about \u20ac367 million (roughly $400 million), split almost evenly: around \u20ac183 million for the 14 trains and \u20ac184 million for the infrastructure around them. That infrastructure covers three plants to produce, store and distribute renewable hydrogen along the line, sited at Brescia, Iseo and Edolo, plus a new depot and refueling facility at Rovato. The first trainset arrived at that Rovato depot in January 2025 after shipping over from Alstom’s test circuit in Salzgitter, Germany, and the depot is the first in Italy purpose-built to maintain and refuel hydrogen trains. Industrial gas firm Sapio is handling production and supply of the hydrogen itself.<\/p>\n
The idea, branded the first Italian “Hydrogen Valley,” is to stand up a working hydrogen supply chain in one alpine valley and use rail as the anchor customer. FNM has also lined up 40 hydrogen buses to replace its diesel coaches in the same area, so the trains are only part of the plan. Much of the funding traces back to Italy’s PNRR, the country’s post-pandemic recovery program, which is a polite way of saying the clock on the spending is not infinitely flexible.<\/p>\n
None of this has gone to plan. The Coradia Stream H was originally meant to enter service in late 2024 or early 2025, and it is now aiming for the first half of 2026 at the earliest, once test runs wrap and the usual stack of safety authorizations clears. Italian outlets have been blunt about the slippage, with one Brescia paper flatly noting the program was running more than a year behind.<\/p>\n
The bigger complication showed up at the end of 2025, when Alstom said it would pause development of new hydrogen train programs and wind down the dedicated division, blaming the looming end of French state funding for the technology. That set off a small panic in Brescia over whether the Valcamonica trains were at risk. Alstom’s answer was that Italy’s contracts would be honored, operational support included, and that the Coradia Stream H was still in testing in Italy and Germany with service expected in 2026. Lombardy’s regional transport councillor took a similar line, framing the funding fight as strictly a matter between Alstom and the French government, unrelated to the trains Lombardy had already paid for and taken delivery of.<\/p>\n
Then, in April 2026, Alstom did something that complicated the picture further: it bought the fuel-cell business that makes its trains work. As AutoNotion covered when the deal closed<\/a>, Alstom acquired Cummins’ Hydrogenics rail fuel-cell unit, the supplier whose cells, built in Herten, Germany, power both the German iLint fleet and the Italian Coradia Stream H. Cummins was walking away from hydrogen after roughly $657 million in losses across fifteen months. Alstom, having just paused new development, now owns the supply line for the contracts it still has to finish. Whatever else that signals, it is not a company doubling down on hydrogen rail.<\/p>\n The blueprint for all of this is Alstom’s Coradia iLint<\/a>, which the company revealed at the InnoTrans trade fair in Berlin in 2016 and put into regular passenger service in Lower Saxony in 2018, making it the world’s first hydrogen fuel-cell passenger train. It was designed for exactly the kind of non-electrified regional line the Brescia\u2013Iseo\u2013Edolo route represents, with a range Alstom puts at up to 1,000 km. One iLint covered 1,175 km on a single tank during a 2022 demonstration, which is still the number that gets quoted whenever anyone questions whether a fuel-cell train can go the distance.<\/p>\n The link between the German and Italian trains runs deeper than a shared platform. The fuel cells in both came from the same Cummins-owned plant in Herten, which is the whole reason the April acquisition mattered. Hydrogen keeps turning up as the convenient answer for transport that is hard to electrify, from regional rail to the hydrogen fuel-cell drones<\/a> setting endurance records, and even as a fuel that, according to Canadian geologists measuring it leaking out of the ground<\/a>, might not always need to be manufactured at all. Rail is just the most visible place the bet is being made with public money.<\/p>\n Italy is not moving in isolation. In late May 2026, India’s Ministry of Railways approved its first indigenous hydrogen trainset for the Jind\u2013Sonipat route in Haryana, a roughly 90-km non-electrified stretch in the country’s north. The Indian train is a different animal: a 10-car set built by the Integral Coach Factory in Chennai to RDSO specifications, running a 1,200-kW fuel-cell system at a top speed of 75 km\/h, which India has billed as the most powerful hydrogen train in the world. As BusinessToday reported<\/a>, the approval puts India alongside Germany, Japan and China on the short list of countries running or testing hydrogen rail.<\/p>\n The two stories rhyme in a useful way. India and Italy approved or delivered their first hydrogen trains within weeks of each other, both for non-electrified regional lines that diesel had owned by default, and both still parked at the “approved and built but not yet carrying paying passengers” stage. Indian railway officials were careful to point out that clearance is not the same as a launch, with compliance reports still owed to several safety bodies. Italy is in the same waiting room, one set of authorizations away from running.<\/p>\n For a fuel that spent much of 2025 getting written off, hydrogen rail is having a strangely busy spring. The honest read on the Brescia\u2013Iseo\u2013Edolo line is that the hard engineering is mostly done, the valley has its plants and its depot, and the first train is sitting in Rovato waiting on paperwork rather than physics. What changed underneath it is the industry itself. The German trains, the Italian trains and the fuel cells that power both are now controlled end to end by one European company that has openly slowed its appetite for the next generation of them. The first hydrogen train up the Valcamonica will be a real milestone whenever it carries its first passenger. It just arrives at a moment when the people who build these things are a lot more cautious than the headlines about them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Hydrogen trains have spent the last few years quietly collecting first-in-the-country headlines. Germany put the world’s first fuel-cell passenger train … <\/p>\nGermany did this first, and the same fuel cells made it work<\/h2>\n
India switched on its own first hydrogen train a couple of weeks ago<\/h2>\n
Where this actually leaves things<\/h2>\n