Giuseppe Bianchi (engineer)

Offered a job by Ferrovie dello Stato, the operator of the Italian rail network, he was first assigned to the select committee for the electrification of Rome.

Mainstream historiography holds that the change of the heads of the Railroads of the State after Fascism's partial takeover of power may have contributed to defeating internal resistance within Ferrovie dello Stato to using direct current.

The initial failure of his attempts to reach high speeds with his locomotives and with the electric trains ETR 200 allowed his political and industrial opponents to get him dismissed from the assignment in 1937.

This strategy of specialization was not entirely new, but at that time the depot-system was very heterogeneous: inherited from the different railroad administrations left over after the 1905 birth of the national railway system, it had many different engines carrying out the same task, making management and maintenance burdensome.

To meet this requirement, in 1928 he introduced the theory of 'Interoperabilità' (interoperability): all the technical components of the locomotives should be simplified in their planning-stages (in favor of reliability) and of a single standardized design to make finding spare parts easier.