RailEnquiry

Could this sleek, red railway equivalent of a Ferrari one day cut a blurry dash through the Chilterns? If Britain has struggled to sell the idea of high-speed rail to a sceptical public, the government might like to turn to Italy for inspiration.

From Saturday, the traveller from Rome to Naples can cover the 225km (140 miles) in little over an hour, paying as little as €20 (£16.33) for the pleasure.

The new Italo – the first privately operated high-speed train in Europe – is a train like no other, claims Luca Cordero di Montezemolo, chairman of Ferrari and boss of NTV, the firm challenging the state service.

He has a point. Sleeker, faster, quieter, lighter, the AGV – automotrice à grande vitesse – brings into passenger service the technology behind the train world speed record of 574.8kmph in April 2007.

British campaigners for high speed rail rolled out music veteran and train enthusiast Pete Waterman in January, but only the Italians could attempt to make a train launch sexy.

Mobbed by press at the inaugural journey from Rome Tiburtina, the flamboyant Montezemolo purred: "I'm addicted to speed. Speed and risk. Economic risk."

There are no travel "classes", NTV insists, only different "ambiences" – albeit differentiated by bigger seats, at-seat dining and pricier tickets.

"Remember, you're in the cheap seats!" cried Montezemolo, to the press in carriage seven (ambience: "Smart"). He stressed that "our prices are super-competitive despite the services we offer", which include free Wi-Fi, live TV, films in a cinema carriage and comfortable leather seating.

Should his Nuovo Trasporto Viaggiatori (NTV) successfully grab a projected 20% share of the market from state-owned Trenitalia and start making money, Montezemolo told the Guardian he might indeed seek to export his brand of superfast travel to the UK. "If it's possible to compete in other countries, yes we would."

Other markets will be in play long before the UK gets its act together. The transport department says no decisions have been taken about either the parameters for procurement of trains or how operators will be sought.

The hybrid bill that will give the parliamentary muscle to make HS2, the proposed high-speed railway from London to Birmingham, a reality is still a potential pitfall, for all the assent that the transport secretary can give.

The manufacturing and engineering group Alstom, which provided Virgin's Pendolinos for the west coast mainline as well as France's TGVs and now the state of the art Italo AGV, will doubtless be one of the prime contenders to build the trains that should ply the tracks from London to Birmingham after 2026.

Not only does the AGV hit the top speeds that the tracks allow effortlessly, it does not display anything so vulgar as a locomotive doing the pushing or pulling.

Distributed traction means that where you might expect to find a locomotive is, on the Italo, the cinema car; at the other end, the Prima carriage. This, according to Pierre-Louis Bertina, boss of Alstom's Italian train operations, is the most visible difference.

The bigger technological advances, Bertina said, are hidden from the layman. The train's speed is capped on these tracks at 300kph, well within its capabilities. In true Ferrari and Formula One style, Alstom promises rapid "pit stop" maintenance as well as tracking technology to identify problems remotely, fix them quickly and keep the service running – an operation similar to the one it provides in the UK for Virgin.

While the original high speed route in Italy connecting Rome and Florence dates back to 1978, most of the shoots of the wider network have grown over the last seven years, now running from Turin to Venice, crossing the Milan to Salerno line (still under construction in parts).

Asked how high-speed rail changes a country, Montezemolo talked of how he had once spent an hour crossing Rome in the metro. Today, he was doing half the ancient Appian Way down to Naples in the same time.

Andrew Adonis, the transport minister who put HS2 in motion, thought that the economic benefits would be clear: Birmingham could in effect be part of the London economy. Montezemolo concurs: "It's like a super-metropolitan system for the while country," he said.

In fact, it makes the journey between Italy's great classical cities virtually identical timewise to traversing London's Northern Line. That, Montezemolo might hasten to add, is where the comparison ends.