At the same time, the railways have traditionally been used as an organisation to absorb excess labour and keep unemployment down. ‘What a lot of officials!’ wrote D. H. Lawrence on the station in Messina, Sicily, in 1920. ‘You know them by their caps. Elegant tubby little officials in kid-and-patent boots and gold-laced caps, tall long nosed ones in more gold-laced caps, like angels in and out of the gates of heaven they thread in and out of the various doors.’
Having shed a hundred thousand staff in the past twenty years, Trenitalia is no longer so dramatically overmanned but still employs far more personnel per mile travelled than France, Germany or Britain. Ten thousand of the ninety-nine thousand rail workers are considered unnecessary. And the officials still have smart caps with gold bands, and shiny buttons on their dark jackets.
Returning from Venice one evening to the tiny station of Verona Porta Vescovo, I discovered that the doors would not open. On the Interregionale there is a red handle you pull upwards when the train stops. The door should slide open. One passenger after another yanked and tugged. Imprecation, blasphemy. Since there were platforms on both sides of the train, they yanked and tugged on both sides. Just as the train began to move off, a door jerked open and a handful of passengers spilled out.
At which point, still congratulating ourselves on our close shave, we were yelled at by a man with a wonderfully peaked cap, a cap far larger and rounder and above all redder than seemed necessary. It was the cap of the capostazione, the stationmaster. Someone explained why we had got off when the train was already in motion, which of course is strictly forbidden. ‘Non esiste!’ the important man protested. It wasn’t possible that the doors wouldn’t open. We must have done something wrong. Various passengers corroborated the story. ‘Non esiste!’ he insisted. It can’t be. Perhaps to work for Trenitalia sometimes requires living in denial.
For example, it’s clear that if ticket prices are to be low (less than half the prices on Deutschebahn, less than a third of British railway companies) and manning high, the train service will be expensive to run. How can a country with a national debt running at more than 100 per cent of GNP deal with this? One answer is: il supplemento.
If to take an Interregionale to Milan costs €6.82, to take the faster Intercity costs €11.05, or rather the base ticket of €6.82 plus a supplement of €4.23; the even faster (just) Eurostar will cost a further 50 cents. Once upon a time the supplement formed only a small percentage of the ticket, but since basic rail fares are taken into account to calculate national inflation rates, while Intercity rail fares are not, or not until recently, the supplement has tended to grow in relation to the basic ticket. A great deal of inflation can be hidden with such ruses. But what do you get for this extra money? The Interregionale takes fourteen minutes longer than the Intercity and twenty-four minutes longer than the Eurostar. Do I value fourteen minutes of my time at €4.23?
It’s more complicated than that.
To encourage people to pay the higher fare, the Interregionali tend to disappear for certain periods of the day, especially if you’re making a long trip. On the other hand, following a logic that runs exactly contrary to notions of supply and demand, if you travel with the living dead, as I am often obliged to, the only trains will be Interregionali, to cater to the poorer commuters, the damned, those who could not, on a daily basis, pay the higher fare, all this thanks to that rather pious though always welcome Italian commitment to a certain kind of popular socialism (of which needless to say both Catholicism and Fascism are close relatives). The more demand, then, the lower the fare.
So we have the 6.40 Verona–Genova Interregionale in the morning and the terrifying 18.15 Milano–Venezia Interregionale in the evening. Curiously, these humdrum overcrowded commuter convoys with their cheaper tickets travelling at peak times are the most reliable and the most punctual. Covering 100 miles in two hours with a locomotive and rolling stock capable of 110 miles an hour, they have time to play with.
SO ON THE FIRST day of the new academic year I buy my annual season ticket to Milan. There is no special window. You stand in the queue with everyone else. Four windows are manned, six are not. Fortunately, they recently introduced a single queuing system at Verona Porta Nuova, a long winding snake between rope barriers, this to avoid those frustrating situations where you choose the wrong queue and find yourself stuck for hours. We all welcomed this sign of progress and civilisation. The ropes were a smart white and red swinging from bright chrome posts; but having set up the snake, they failed to block entry to the windows to people who had not queued up, people entering at what was supposed to be the exit.
A man leans against a pillar, chewing gum, watching, waiting, then, just as a window becomes free, he strides rapidly towards it and pushes in. The ticket seller knows what has happened but does not protest. The people in the queue grumble but don’t actually intervene. This has always surprised me in Italy, the general resignation in the face of the furbo, the sly one. It is always worth trying it on here. If things get unpleasant, you can protest that you didn’t understand the rules.
A notice tells you that you’re not supposed to ask for information at the ticket window, just buy your ticket and go, but people are asking for the most detailed information. ‘How much would it cost to switch from second to first class on an overnight train
