At this point there were 102,000 railway personnel, more than the total number of Italian civil servants and by far the largest body of organised labour in the country. They were also a closely knit workforce, wearing uniforms, forced by long and unsociable working hours to develop an esprit de corps, proud of their technology and responsibilities. Through the coming years, and particularly during the First World War, in which the railways played a huge role, these men would become more and more militantly socialist and then Communist. After nationalisation they won themselves an eight-hour day, which forced their new employers to more than double the number of railway workers, to 226,000. Add to that the large pay increases necessary to keep this dangerously powerful group happy and it was clear that the railways would be a severe burden to the taxpayer for decades to come. In 1914 the legal expert Giuseppe Cimbali, contributing to a wide-ranging document on aspects of public administration in Italy, wrote:
Aware of being a crucial part of the central and miraculous movement of modern life, railway personnel reckon themselves a cut above all others and believe they are owed every kind of indulgence and privilege. Feeding on the violence unleashed by steam engines and electric dynamos, they refuse to accept any bridle or limit. Accustomed to racing along at vertiginous speeds, they react at once to any attempt to hold them in common chains.
Reading this, one appreciates why, even today, whenever a capotreno approaches you to check your ticket, you have the impression you are dealing with a police officer or even a soldier. Public notices warn that ‘the ticket inspector is a public official’, and announcements in the stations declare that ‘refusal to show him a valid ID is a criminal offence’. It also explains why it is still illegal to take photos in Italian railway stations; apparently they are essential to national security.
1,196 railway men died in wartime activities between 1915 and 1918, and 1,281 were decorated. After the armistice Italy annexed the railways of Trentino, the South Tyrol and the northern Adriatic as far as Trieste, more than six hundred miles of lines. The railways were also central to the huge patriotic ceremony arranged for the entombment of an unknown soldier that was to give a cathartic closure to this first traumatic national war fought on national territory: on 29 October 1920, a coffin bearing the soldier’s corpse was loaded onto a train in Aquileia, a small coastal town east of Venice and in an area that had seen fierce fighting among Italian, Austrian and German troops; from there, stopping for ceremonies in every station and cheered at every level crossing it was taken down to Rome, where it arrived four days later, on 2 November, the Day of the Dead. In triumph and grief, the image of the train was fused with mass patriotism.
Two years later almost to the day, another train traveller heading north to south was greeted with noisy celebration on his arrival in Stazione Termini: Benito Mussolini. The 1922 March on Rome was greatly facilitated by Fascist elements among the railway workers who arranged special trains for the marchers from northern Italy down to the capital. Mussolini himself hung back, waiting to see if his coup was going to succeed before finally boarding a regular night train that left Milano Centrale at 8.30 p.m. and arrived in Roma Termini at 10.50 the following morning, an hour and a half late. Over the next twenty years Il Duce would make train punctuality a test case for Fascist efficiency. Brutally hard on left-wing unionism, he cut the workforce by more than 50,000 men, making sure that the most militant were among those to go and introducing a railway militia to monitor workers’ behaviour. This heavy stick was then balanced with a paternalist carrot: health care, cheap food and cheap housing made the railway workers a highly privileged group. Recreational spaces and organisations were encouraged, in particular the famous Associazione Nazionale Dopolavoro Ferroviario (After-Hours Railwaymen), which promoted group holidays and sporting activities. In 1928 the Baedeker was able to reassure foreign tourists that the trains in Italy were running mainly on time.
Yet it was during Fascism that the long decline began. A drastic downturn in the economy in 1929 cut the numbers of passengers and the volume of freight. The roads were now beginning to offer serious competition and a radically different vision of the future. Some smaller lines were substituted with buses. The regime responded with a programme of hi-tech investment. Since coal was an expensive and politically sensitive import, a resource foreign governments might easily withhold from them in the event of sanctions, the Fascists speeded up the process of electrifying the main lines, particularly in the northern mountains, where they were able to exploit the territory’s hydroelectric resources and hence alleviate the problem of coal smoke in tunnels. Italy was and still is ahead of other countries in railway electrification. New lines were laid between many main stations to shorten the distances. In 1937 an Italian electric locomotive achieved the world speed record for a train in commercial operation with an average speed of 106 miles per hour on a regular passenger trip from Bologna to Milan.
The problem was to get people on board the trains and hopefully paying for their tickets. Foreign tourists and businessmen would always use the main lines, and commuters were more or less condemned to using the suburban lines. But what about
