On 14 June 1940, just four days after Il Duce declared war on France, an armed Italian train running along the Costa Azzura began shelling French naval vessels. Throughout the war the trains moved troops, refugees, armaments and prisoners in huge numbers. Eventually the railways were bombed by the Allies and blown up by the retreating Germans. After the Italian surrender in 1943, the Germans, who were occupying the centre and north of the country, made Verona their main transport hub, lying as the city does on the intersection between the east–west (Milan–Venice) and north–south (Rome– Berlin) routes. So it was from Verona, from those same platforms where I catch my train of the living dead, that Jews and other undesirables were shipped north in stifling or freezing freight wagons over the Brenner Pass and onward to the gas chambers of Auschwitz and Birkenau. One such wagon is still preserved in Verona Porta Nuova and displayed every year on the Day of the Shoah in Piazza Bra, the city’s central square. Auschwitz survivor Primo Levi wrote: ‘No diary or story written by those of us who came back is complete without its train, the sealed wagons, transformed from freight trucks to mobile prisons or even instruments of death.’
2,104 railwaymen died in the Second World War, 407 of them in partisan actions. To their great credit, some workers did attempt to sabotage the German war effort by damaging switching systems and locomotives. At the end of the war, in one way or another, 4,500 miles of line had been destroyed, together with 4,750 rail bridges. Paradoxically, even though the full extent of the pre-war network was never entirely restored, by 1950 the number of passengers had doubled in comparison with the late 1930s, though the amount of freight being carried was falling off fast. The roads were winning that contest. Through the 1950s there was a frenzy of road building. No one was thinking of global warming. No one was worried that petrol might be a limited resource. Traffic congestion was not a concern. Nor were the thousands of road deaths. All that mattered was individual freedom and the dream of door-to-door service. In April 1961 the automobile magazine Quattroruote (Four Wheels) promoted a race from Milan to Rome between the new, fast electric train, the Settebello, and an Alfa Romeo Giulietta. The train made it in six hours, thirty-seven minutes. The Alfa did it in five hours, fifty-nine minutes. Game over. As the autostrada construction programme moved into full swing, the Ferrovie dello Stato began to haemorrhage passengers.
It was at this point, no doubt, that you started to see the distinction between two kinds of rail travel that is becoming more and more evident today. Most train transport would be a service for the carless poor, for commuters with no choice, for backpackers and drifters, the living dead, or for eccentrics like me who loathe driving any distance at all. Cheap, slow, poorly serviced night trains, the so-called treni di speranza (trains of hope) would take workers, students and later immigrants the six hundred miles from south to north at dirt-cheap prices. Filthy commuter trains would bring low-paid workers into Milan, Rome and Genoa on annual season tickets that wouldn’t pay for a month’s travel in countries north of the Alps. Ancient rolling stock wasn’t even dusted off to carry football fans to away games. Here, alongside the acknowledgement that the railways had an important social and economic function, there would be no serious investment and only the absolutely essential maintenance. This was, and is, a soup-kitchen approach to rail transport. Any self-respecting person with the price of a car, or an air ticket, would drive or fly. How many times in casual conversation have people shown surprise that I don’t drive to Milan?
But then for the business folks, the respectable tourists and the phobics who can’t fly there would be the luxury trains; first the Settebello, then the Rapido and Super Rapido, then the Eurostar, trains that required you to pay double or triple for speed and hygiene. Even here, though, it was hard to compete with a road network that was soaking up 80 per cent of public investment in infrastructure. The terrorist bombs that killed twelve people on a night train between Florence and Bologna in 1974 and again eighty-five people in the waiting room at Bologna station in 1980 did not help. I was in Verona the day of the Bologna bomb, on a holiday with my wife to visit her brother and to check out the possibility of moving there. Though I wasn’t aware of it then, when I settled in Italy in 1981, the Ferrovie dello Stato were moving into what might have proved a terminal decline; government investment was low, yet at the same time politicians were once again forcing the railways to take on more workers than they could possibly need or use. Even the nostalgia that began to attach itself to trains was a bad sign. Nothing is more obsolete than yesterday’s vision of the future.
In 1985 train ticket prices, after accounting for inflation, were a third of what they had been at the beginning of the century, while the cost of labour had multiplied by six. Train travel was more or less being given away to keep people sweet. At this point, in a flourish of semi-seriousness, the rail company was transformed into an
