Off Track

I have heard many horrifying stories about Italy's train service: multiple hour delays, re-routing of trains mid-journey, nightmare travelling conditions due to overcrowded cars; none of which I believed until yesterday. Up to this point, I have been a staunch defender of trains, and believer of the ridiculous saying "Nothing runs on time in Italy except for the trains."

Yesterday changed all that. Yesterday I had the train ride from hell. Or to hell. I'm not sure as of yet which would constitute the worse journey. Whichever one it was, I was on it!

First of all let me preempt this post by explaining my trip down to Naples: Friday night we left Padova on time at 9:42 pm for Bologna, where we had to wait an hour for our connecting train to Naples which left at 12:34 am. Trains arrive on time. All's well. Get on the train to Naples and stager through the moving cars to find our reserved seats, which happened to be in a compartment with three Napoletanos (read: men) who had locked the door shut with one of their belts. So after we woke them up and got settled, they proceeded to lock us into the compartment with them and fall back asleep. Luckily I wasn't travelling alone.

The rest of the ride was uneventful, but I never realized how hard it would be to sleep on a train with lights wizzing by, being unable to close the blinds for fear of suffocation and overheating, unable to close the window for said reasons, and unable to go to the bathroom as a result of said belt. Silly me. And here I thought it would be just like travelling by plane. Needless to say I only got about 3 hours of sleep tops.

Once arriving in Naples at 6:52 am, we decided to buy our return tickets to Padova for Monday.

Enter Problem #1: The train we were planning to take (Eurostar) was sold out. As was every other Eurostar train heading in a northernly direction on May 1st. It is worth noting at this point that Eurostars are the only trains where they don't sell more tickets than seats. This should have been a sign of things to come, but what could we do? We were already in Naples, and had to get back on Monday. So we decided to take an Intercity train from Naples to Bologna (7 hours), and then buy a seperate ticket for a train from Bologna to Padova (2 hours). So far so good. A little more expensive, but oh well. At least we had tickets.

Skip ahead to Monday, May 1, 2006:

We woke up in Sorrento, went out for breakfast, and then headed back to the station to catch the circumvesuviana rail-tram thing that services all stops between Naples and Sorrento (including Herculaneum, Mt. Vesuvius, and Pompeii). We took the 12:37 pm rail-tram. Travel time to Naples: 1 hour 15 minutes.

So we arrived at the Naples train station with about 50 minutes to spare before our 2:42 pm train to Bologna.

Enter problem #2: When the train pulled into the station, we noticed that all the cars had a 1, for first class, on the outside. Since we had second class tickets (no seat reservation), we had tried to position ourselves on the platform in a good spot to ensure that we got seats. But with all the carriages saying 1st class, we didn't know what to do. We got on the train, and wouldn't you know, that out of all the cars on the train, we chose to get on one of the only two cars that were actually first class. All the others were acting as second class. So of course by the time we figured that out, all the seats were taken. I managed to find a compartment with only one seat avaliable, so we agreed to take turns until someone got off.

Enter problem #3: The train didn't actually go anywhere for quite awhile. Apparently a train had broken down in between Naples and Rome thusly blocking the route, and another train had to be sent for to take all the passengers away before they could remove the train from the tracks. The "10 minute delay due to engine trouble" announcement turned into a "the situation is a huge mess and we have no idea how long things will take to fix" announcement. Only in Italy.....

(Platform full of people waiting for the train delay to clear in Naples)

We finally got moving 95 minutes later (i.e. 4:17 pm) and were told that the train would recouperate the lost time. Riight.

Enter problem #4: The train got SLOWER instead of faster!!! Even though we bypassed the main train station in Rome to save time, we left Rome 135 minutes behind schedule (please keep in mind that the normal travel time between Naples and Rome is about 2.5 hours tops). No doubt the increasing delay was due to all the 20-30 minutes breaks spent sitting at various, insignificant train stations along the way.

Enter problem #5: Rome is about 5 hours from Bologna, on a good train. On our train? Who knows. The exponentially increasing delay meant that we would miss the last train out of Bologna to Padova for the night since the last train left at 11:13 pm, and we would get there by 11 pm IF there were no more slow-downs. Unlikely! So we started calling around to see if anyone could pick us up. No dice.

We decided to consult one of the employees to see if there was any train behind us going to Padova that would stop at one of the stations we were stopping at so that we might intercept it and be able to get home. After checking on-line and radio-ing another conductor, we found a Eurostar night train going to Vienna through Padova that was due to stop at the station we were approaching. We had about 5 minutes to grab our things and jump off the train in Chiusi. The night train came along about 10 minutes later and we hopped on.

Enter problem #6: The train was three carriages long, two of which were for first class with beds. And the third carriage? Well, that was packed to the brim with people spilling out into the aisles. So we squished ourselves in, like cattle, and managed to secure fold-out seats in the aisle for most of our journey. We finally got to Padova around 12:38 am and had a friend come and pick us up at the station.

Over 12 hours of travelling for a 7.5-8 hour trip. Ridiculous. And did you know it is possible to have residual train symptoms? While laying in my bed trying to fall asleep, I still felt like I was on a moving train.

I'm telling you. That adventure was enough to cure me from trusting trains for a long time.