Dopo la neve, gli inglesi: l’articolo dell’Observer sullo stato delle ferrovie italiane

Periodaccio per Trenitalia: non bastassero i problemi metereologici, ora arrivano anche gli inglesi. “Last train to Sicily”: questo infatti il titolo di un delizioso (e ironico) articolo del domenicale Observer sullo stato delle ferrovie italiane e sul taglio dei treni notte:

“In the 150th anniversary of Italy’s unification, railway officials managed to do in a day what the Northern League party here has tried and failed to do in a decade – split Italy in two,” one night train guard complained to me bitterly.

Rail operator Trenitalia argues that night train passengers have dropped 60% in 10 years and it is losing €95m a year on the service, despite government subsidies. But more than 20,000 night-train regulars and aficionados were incensed, signing a petition to save the routes as 800 guards and staff were laid off. And because protests are never dull in Italy, three guards barricaded themselves up a tower at Milan station, claiming they would not come down until the routes were resumed.

Italian newspapers turned out nostalgic tales of the service’s glory days in the 1950s and 1960s when southern migrants armed with cardboard suitcases would queue for up to 18 hours for a one-way ticket to a job in the booming factories in Turin and Milan. Even now, watching Sicilians board the sleepers dressed in absurdly heavy clothing to combat what they suspect will be polar conditions in Rome, you get a sense of migrants heading for an unknown country.

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