At least the jetlag meant I wasn't too upset about having to catch a 7:00 train! My first train of the day was the Leonardo Express on the left, operated with a Jazz (Alstom Coradia) EMU. I would have preferred to ride the Rock (Hitachi Caravaggio) running the local train service on the right, but that would have required a connection, and I wanted to get into town with enough time for breakfast before my connecting train.
It may be looking a bit run-down these days, but I've always liked the Fiumicino train station, with its 90s-modern interpretation of a train shed. Some elements of the design language are present in other parts of Rome's 90s-era regional rail expansion, especially the yellow tubular structure, but this is the only station to have gotten a train shed.
Roma Termini is a pretty cool station too, with its cool (and way ahead-of-its-time) wavy roof from the late 40s. This really looks like something from a couple decades later!
Like most major Italian train stations, Trenitalia has turned this place into more and more of a mall as time has gone on (though at least there's a decent mix of stores here, including a couple grocery stores and plenty of other practical places in addition to the designer stores no one ever seems to shop at).
Next up was the long train of the day, the Frecciaregento (Silver Arrow) from Termini to Villa San Giovanni. This was operated by a Fiat ETR.485, the only type still operating as Frecciaregento as Trenitalia is phasing out that brand and the second-oldest (but somehow oldest-looking) high-speed train currently in service in Italy.
If you buy tickets in advance (even just a month or so in advance like I did), it's absurdly cheap to upgrade to first class on Trenitalia -- costs for the four legs of my trip cost between €0 (yes, seriously) and €10 per segment, with the whole thing costing less than €20 more for first class than second. Of course, you don't get all that much for that -- a slightly more comfortable seat (the best part being that one side of the train has single seats) and a snack box with mini water bottle at the start of the trip. With me being on this train for 5 hours, I was hoping they might bring a second set around at some point, but apparently not! These trains look quite outdated on the inside, with the headrests and armrests even still showing the old Eurostar AV logo used from 2006 to 2012.
Villa San Giovanni was my destination because that's where the ferries to Sicily leave from. But I wasn't directly boarding the ferry from here...
Instead, it was time to get on another train -- a train that goes on that ferry! The title of today's post is what pretty much everyone I know said when I told them I was going to Italy to take a train that goes on a ferry -- they're extremely rare these days to the point that even other transportation fans apparently don't know they ever existed (in fact, as far as I can tell, there are only two or three places in the world where passenger trains still go on ferries: this one to Sicily, one in China, and maybe one in northern Europe which might not have come back after COVID).
I've said before that ferries are probably the only form of transportation that I find significantly less interesting than the average person does, and in many ways, this ferry feels a lot like the ones I've taken countless times back home. Except there's a train on it!
And while this may feel like a thing of the past (including using some of Italy's oldest rolling stock, with Intercity carriages dating back to the 60s), they've made some upgrades in recent years, including switching to locomotives with batteries in just the past few months to eliminate the need for shunting locomotives, and the use of cab cars to speed up loading and unloading by allowing the trains to be controlled from both ends (unlike what I'm used to from car ferries, trains only load and unload from one end of the ferry for reasons I'm not entirely clear on). Trenitalia has managed to shave nearly an hour off the travel time over the past year or so, which is pretty impressive! And the ferry I was on is from 2021, making it several years newer than anything Washington State Ferries has.
You can just stay on the train the whole time (and I did on the way back), but this time I decided to head upstairs to check out the passenger cabin, and mostly to look at the views.
I wasn't particularly impressed with the passenger cabin, which struck me as basically being a smaller, worse version of what my local ferries have. You couldn't even go outside on the front of the boat, just the back. I did find it amusing how they apparently call the spot where the trains are the "garage"!
My seat on the train was aligned with one of the very few window openings on the train deck, allowing me to see some of Messina as we pulled into the harbor.
The train ride from Messina to Catania is incredibly scenic, though unfortunately I was very tired by this time, after close to 8 hours on various trains running half the length of Italy. It's pretty impressive how little time it actually takes to ride the train this far, especially when you take the high-speed train for the long segment (the Intercity to Catania/Palermo -- it splits at the ferry -- actually runs all the way from Rome, but it leaves an hour and a half earlier with the Frecciaregento passing it a couple hours in) -- Google Maps suggests it takes the same amount of time as driving, but I don't think that properly accounts for ferry waiting time, so the train is probably quicker in the end. In the amount of time this took, Amtrak would barely get me to Portland on a bad day!
To wrap up this post with some actual on-topic retail content, here are a couple grocery stores in Catania I visited after dinner: Lidl, where I accidentally set off the alarms by going out the in door because they didn't have anything I was looking for (they didn't have one-way gates, but apparently they have some sort of sensor), and Deco, where I actually did buy some stuff.
I think that's it for the most exciting transportation stuff on this trip, so the rest of the posts should go a bit faster!
Interesting stuff. I don't know much about trains. I was on a train between Milan and Bergamo in 2002 and it certainly didn't look anywhere near as impressive as what is in this photo! Granted, Milan and Bergamo are not far apart. At least the entire car was empty aside from the local I was traveling with and myself so that was good, but the journey wasn't anything memorable.
ReplyDeleteMy experience with hotels at airports is that the hotels usually aren't anything impressive. Granted, the only airport hotel I've stayed at in recent times was a Delta hotel at YYC. I've stayed that many Delta Hotels in Canada and that easily had the worst room of any of them. It was fine, but it probably felt like something more fitting a Rodeway Inn than a mid-tier hotel. At least the restaurant and such was fine. To be fair, the Delta in downtown Calgary wasn't anything great either, but at least it was more modern.
Lidl was supposed to open several stores in Houston in the late 2010s. They purchased land and filed permits for construction, but the construction never happened and they sold (or at least attempted to) the land they bought. Perhaps they saw that Aldi was having a hard time here in Houston and they decided to think twice about the investment. Aldi is still around here, but they're hardly the big success that they are in Florida. I can't say I've ever set an alarm off while visiting stores overseas. That must not have been the most comfortable feeling, but at least you could accurately say you are a foreign visitor!
Milan-Bergamo would probably have just been a Regionale (operated by Trenord), which generally aren't the most interesting trains (though it can be nice when you get a double-decker train!). I imagine that route is a lot busier than that these days with all the low-cost flights into Bergamo! I've been on plenty of empty trains in Italy myself -- that's the thing with the Regionale; you just never know if your train is going to be packed or if you're going to be the only one on it!
DeleteLidl never really seems to have found its place in the US market, which is too bad because the initial stores they built were quite cool! Neither them nor Aldi seem to have ever had any interest in the northwest, which is unfortunate since we could really use some lower-cost grocery options.
Ha -- I just kept walking, completely ignoring the alarm! I'm used to that from all of the random alarms that go off at stores around here (with carts that randomly lock up being the most common cause).