Hitachi Rail Italy S. Formerly AnsaldoBreda S. In , the company Gio. The company was backed by Camillo Benso, Count of Cavour , the powerful finance minister of Piedmont-Sardinia , who aimed to reduce its dependence on imported trains and rolling stock.
During the First World War , Ansaldo became a large supplier of weapons to the Italian army; facing insurmountable difficulties with post-war reconversion to civilian industry, the company was eventually nationalised in After the Second World War the company was facing bankruptcy, and was eventually nationalised in During the Italian economic miracle of the s, Breda produced a highly successful commuter train, the FS Class ETR , several classes of railcars and locomotives , and diversified into defense OTO Melara and, especially, buses.
In a massive restructuring effort, in the Italian state merged all the rolling stock activities of the then loss-making Ansaldo and Breda in a new company, AnsaldoBreda , [ 9 ] that in turn became part of the Finmeccanica state-owned group.
On 4 July , after several incidents where the doors would open while the train was in motion, Metro removed the fleet for repairs until 20 July that year. On 17 November Metro discovered an error in which a series car would display an incorrect speed limit to a train operator while in manual mode which is the only mode used since the June Washington Metro train collision. On 7 June Metro announced that the series cars would be fully retired and removed from service on 1 July , and by that date all cars were taken out of service.
However, the last train was delivered only in and IC4 trains have seen many technical problems during their service. After winning a big contract for the Dutch-Belgium Fyra project in , nine V train units were delivered to the Dutch partner NS over five years later than originally contracted. Soon after the trains went into service on the high-speed line between the Netherlands and Belgium , the V suffered a number of severe technical problems.
