What I found at that platform was quite exciting (in a Miles in Transit "foamer meter" way 😉). I was hoping for a TAF (an early-00s double-decker EMU), which I knew were fairly common on this route, for the simple reason that one of them was the very first Italian train, and therefore the first "proper" long-distance train, I ever rode, back when they were brand new. (That would have been on the Malpensa Express, from the airport to this very station.) I had been hoping for one of the few that have recently been repainted to the new Trenord livery (like the Hitachi Rock on the other side of the platform), but what I got was even better: This is the livery from LeNord, the predecessor to Trenord, which hasn't existed since 2011. According to Italian trainspotters on Youtube, this is the last TAF (and therefore the last train of any kind, I'm pretty sure) in LeNord livery, and has been for at least a year. The livery itself isn't all that exciting (apart from the green and orange stripes towards the front, the whole thing is just grey and white), but it's still pretty neat to stumble upon something one-of-a-kind like this.
I didn't have much time to spend looking at the train, though -- I didn't have long before it was going to leave! And since I finally didn't have luggage to drag along with me, I headed straight upstairs. (I'm not really sure why LeNord, or whoever was in charge in the 90s when the Malpensa Express was being planned, thought double-decker trains were a good idea on airport routes where practically everyone is going to have luggage with them.) These trains are quite sad these days with graffiti everywhere and non-functional display screens/audio announcements, but there's a picture in a scrapbook somewhere of a 4-year-old NWRetail sitting in one of these seats, so the nostalgia factor is undeniable.
Here's one of the new-livery ones I was talking about earlier. I do like the new Trenord livery, but I wish there was a bit less white space at the ends.
It's about an hour on the train to Como. I would have been so disappointed if I had ended up on the boring Alstom Coradia, the same kind of train that I had taken to and from Tirano, that was about to head back to Cadorna. 
Como Lago is a pretty cool station, but annoyingly there were always buses parked out front. I wonder if it once had a full train shed that was cut down to the odd single-bay thing that's there today.
Across the street is the slightly-newer (but still cool) bus station -- I love the neon sign on the roof.
The pictures make it look like beautiful weather, but while it was bright and sunny, it was also incredibly windy. Even the protected harbor was looking a bit choppy!
I started off walking to the right (east) from the train station. At the end of the walkway in that direction is this interesting fountain that constantly drains into the lake. The vertical jets really show how windy it was (as do the whitecaps on the lake)!
The next stop on my list was the Brunate funicular, which should have had great views of the lake. I had checked the website before I left for Italy, and there was a constant stream of people coming and going at the station, so everything seemed normal. Nope! Right inside the door was a big sign saying that the funicular was closed from February through mid-April for maintenance. Sure would have been nice to know that in advance. (Very Italy Thing number 2 for the day!)
So instead, I headed back through town to check out the west side of the lake. The whole time I was in Como, there was a very friendly (probably too friendly) swan hanging out with tourists along the waterfront.
I'm pretty sure that's the Bergamo Alps (south of Tirano) in the distance rather than anywhere I had been over the past few days, but it's still a pretty view. But the clouds are rolling in, and the wind isn't going anywhere...
Looking the other way, there's the funicular that I really wanted to ride. I guess I have unfinished business in Como -- I sure hope it isn't closed February through April every year, since that's the time of the year I like to travel.
The western walkway has a nice view back into town out towards the end. I wish you could walk further along the lake, but the shoreline is all private property once you get out of the town, leaving a rather unpleasant highway as the only place to walk.
The local aero club is seaplanes only, opening directly onto the lake. It's cool how you can get right up to the open hangar -- it's hard to imagine seeing that in the US! I guess that pigeon really wanted to get in on the action too.
I had no idea Alessandro Volta, the guy the volt is named after, was from Como. There's a whole museum dedicated to him, the Volta Temple, right on the waterfront, but at this point I was worried about time and needed to get going.
The pier where most of the ferries are stored (since they run a very minimal schedule in the winter) is open to the public, another thing I can't imagine seeing in the US. I like the mirrored sculpture down at the end of the pier -- just have to make sure I'm not getting reflected in it in the photos!
It's time for a ferry ride -- which means it's time for a story, because this whole ferry adventure was Very Italian Thing number 3.
It starts a while back, when I was walking across to the west side of town. I noticed that the ticket office was very busy, and the ticket machine was either confusing or useless (I could only get it to sell me tickets to a couple specific places near Como, not to where I wanted to go), so I decided to get my ticket then to make sure I wouldn't run out of time. I wanted to go all the way to Colico at the far north end of the lake (originally I had planned to go to Lecco, at the southeast end of the upside-down Y-shaped lake, but apparently they don't run any ferries on the southeast branch in the wintertime). I noticed that they had signs up saying there were no more ferries to Varenna or Bellagio for the rest of the day -- a bad sign for me since the ferry to Colico stops at those towns -- and sure enough, the ticket seller was turning away seemingly everyone in line in front of me. But when I got there and asked for Colico, he sold me a ticket, no questions asked. Again, the ferries to Colico all stop at Varenna and Bellagio, so I could have gone to either of those places with no trouble (they weren't checking tickets of people getting off the boat or anything like that).
Fast forward an hour or so to the present (as far as these pictures go). I get back to the ferry terminal and find it quite busy, with the waiting area divided into three "lines" (scare quotes because you never find orderly lines in Italy). One is for people with passes (the website did say people with passes, presumably mostly locals, get priority boarding), one is for a few specific destinations that I wasn't going to (I never saw anyone in this line), and one is for "fast ferries". The ferry to Colico is listed as a fast ferry in the schedule, so that was the line I chose. Shortly after I got there, an employee went through the crowd in the fast ferry line and checked everyone's tickets, and when she saw that I was going to Colico, she told me I was in the wrong line and I needed to go to the other one. I was a bit confused since the other one was clearly labelled as being only for people with passes, but I went along with it, hanging out at the back of the crowd so no one could accuse me of trying to cut the line.
So I move over, and eventually the boat pulls up, right at its scheduled departure time -- not a great sign considering how many people were waiting for it. The same lady who told me to go to "the other line" (on the right side of the last picture) was checking everyone's tickets/passes, and rejecting everyone who had a ticket rather than a pass, as the sign indicated. (Right at the front of the line was an American family who decided to have a whole argument with her in English because they wanted to be the first on the boat and didn't care that they were in the wrong place... I'm not sure how it ended up, but there were threats of being prevented from taking the ferry at all unless they moved to the back of the correct line.) I figured I had misunderstood what she said, but stuck with it because I didn't have anything better to do. But no, when I got to the front of the line, she just waved me on. At this point I was thinking that either she was just being nice and giving me early boarding, or people to Colico get early boarding for some reason.
So I get on the boat, about 10 minutes after the scheduled time, happy to get one of the last window seats on a ferry full of (mostly) school children. There were plenty of seats left though, and I settled in expecting to wait even longer while all the people in the other line filed on board. But then, we just... left. I was on the wrong side of the boat to get a picture of it, but I could see all of the people in that other line still waiting on shore, looking on in confusion as we pulled away and left them behind.
So I have no clue what that was all about. On the way out of the harbor, I did notice another (seemingly much nicer) boat coming in which I'm guessing was going to pick up the rest of the passengers, but that leaves me with more questions than answers. Is the 2:20 sailing actually multiple ferries, only one of which goes the whole way, without the schedule bothering to mention this? Was some earlier ferry (maybe the 1:30 sailing, which doesn't go all the way to Colico) running super late without the signage at the terminal mentioning that at all? Since this ferry was only around half full (with plenty of space for the people waiting in the other line), why didn't they put everyone on this ferry? And with how much space there was available, why weren't they letting anyone buy tickets to Bellagio or Varenna, which this ferry absolutely did stop at? It's all just strange.
The fast ferries I've been on in my area have always been sleek, modern boats designed to go fast without kicking up much of a wake. This ferry is... not that. I went to the lower level since there were no more window seats left upstairs, but apparently that was a bit of a mistake since I wasn't really seeing much through all of the spray on the windows, and getting any sort of pictures was even more of a challenge.
Eventually, I was able to get a seat upstairs, where things were... not all that much better. So much for this being a scenic, sightseeing ferry ride like I expected! But it was still fun, and I got some decent views, I just wasn't really able to photograph them.
As the crowds thinned out, I eventually moved to another different seat, further forward and on the other side of the boat, and that one finally provided mostly clear views. Thankfully, the lake wasn't as choppy as when I first got to Como, and this fairly large boat provided a reasonably smooth ride. I believe the mountains straight ahead in the last two pictures are, more or less, in the vicinity of the ones I rode all around on the RhB network.
This end of the lake is seriously stunning, with snow-capped mountains all around.
The town of Colico is absolutely stunning too. I need to come back here some day -- heck, I could totally live here, one of the few places in Italy I would actually say that about.
So with the ferry coming in over 10 minutes late, and having only 15 minutes between that and the train I had planned to catch according to the schedule, I figured there was no way I was going to catch it and just kind of wandered my way over to the station. When I got there, I saw that the train was also 10 minutes late (not sure why it says 5 minutes on the platform sign) and was coming in a minute or two. Obviously I wasn't going to be able to use the app to buy my ticket as I had been doing up to this point (I'd been burned by that one before!), so I headed in and frantically tried to figure out the Trenord vending machine. I was expecting it to spit out a little printed ticket showing at least the to and from, like Trenitalia ticket machines do, but instead it gave me... this thing. No specific information, just a long string of numbers and some notes saying it was a reusable ticket. The machine also told me to validate it, which normally means sticking the ticket into a machine that prints the date and time on it, but the validators they had here were the same sort of thing I had been using to pay with my credit card on the trams in Milan. So I waved the ticket at the machine, and it beeped and said "validated". I guess these tickets have some sort of electronics in them, which seems quite wasteful compared with just a plain piece of paper that gets printed on, and while they claim to be reusable, I tried twice on this trip and the ticket machines never even gave me the option to reuse an existing ticket, simply dumping out a brand-new "reusable" electronic ticket. I guess this is Bonus Very Italy Thing number 4, since I've seen this sort of obsession with disposable electronic ticketing systems going back years (Venice's ferry system had it way back in the early 2010s), but I'm not sure if this is really an Italy thing or an all-Europe thing since I've heard of it in other places too.
The ride along the east side of Lake Como is quite scenic, though taking pictures into the sun through not-so-clear windows is a bit suboptimal. Oh well, it's still pretty!
Changing trains at Monza again, I came across one of Trenord's modern Stadlers with old-fashioned flip-dot signs, just like we saw in Switzerland. Unsurprisingly, these aren't maintained as well as the Swiss ones seemed to be, with plenty of stuck dots visible (mostly around the bottom of the Cs).
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