The privately funded rail operator, NTV, has launched its service in Italy over the last couple weeks.  The operator, part owned by Ferrari, will be the first private high speed service in Italy, and is an exciting development in the almost exclusively government funded rail industry in Europe.

Sachin Sawe has been here at SilverRail since the very beginning.  He is one of the key members of the development team and is always looking for ways to improve the processes and the application.  Sachin has made a great contribution so far, and I'm sure will continue to do so as our development of the SilverCore platform continues.

It is definitely a lot easier for me to write these when it is Aaron or Will or one of the other guys on the team being featured.  It feels a little cheesey coming from me, but anyway...

The UK Trade and Investment Office in Boston is an organization that promotes business ties between businesses in New England and businesses in the UK.  For SilverRail, with offices in Boston and London, we are right in their target group, and they helped us out when we were first setting up in the UK.

An article that our CEO and co-founder Aaron Gowell has written commenting on some of the impending changes in the European travel industry has been featured by Tnooz, the leading site for travel technology.

Aaron comments on the top ten things that he thinks will change the way travel distribution will work in the future.

From the article, a couple of examples:

As part of the announcement about our recent fundraising, our CEO and co-founder Aaron Gowell appeared on Quest Means Business on CNN talking about the opportunity that SilverRail is facing to help consolidate the rail carriers ticketing and reservation systems, particularly in Europe.

We are extremely excited to be announcing that we have closed our Series B funding round of $15m.  The round was led by Canaan Partners, and John Balen will be joining our board going forward.

This funding round will enable us to accelerate the addition of rail carriers into the SilverCore platform, as well investing in the development of cross-border and multi-carrier journey planning.

We are very pleased to announce a new partner in the SilverRail stable.  KDS, an international provider of travel and expense management solutions, has signed on with SilverRail to expand its, already substantial, coverage of rail markets around the globe.  But is also looking to improve functionality with the SilverRail relationship in some markets where it already has its own connections.

Over the past 10 - 15 years, Russia has continued to be considered more and more a part of Europe.  It is by no means there yet, but recent announcements that show that the Russian rail operator is taking a large order of trains that can run both on Russian infrastructure, but also through Europe, is another big step in that process.

There was an article recently that highlighted some of the new trains that Nuovo Trasporto Viaggiatori (NTV), the new Italian train service branded as Italo were going to be using.  The train line is part owned by Ferrari and you can certainly see a hint of the cars in the newly released trains, they look pretty cool.

I can't say that this is particularly related to what we do here at SilverRail, but one of the joys of working at SilverRail is that people send you all sorts of crazy stuff that relates to trains!  And the video below is one of those things.