End of the affair

Oops. My love affair with Italian trains (see previous post) has ended – badly. I will still make the case for public transit in general, but in Sicily, we have discovered, the train is not the way to go for most trips.

To get back to Siracusa, from Palermo where we had been on a mini-vacation while our apartment here was rented out to someone else, we had to take a train from Palermo to Messina – a major city at the northeast corner of the island from which the ferries go to the mainland – and then change for a train that goes along the east coast through Catania and back to Siracusa.

Total travel time, usually: over six hours. Travel time by car or bus: under three hours. Part of the train travel time is the lay-over in Messina, but not much of it.

The trip started badly when the cabin we chose turned out not to have any heat, or very little – it was freezing for most of the three hours to Messina. Maybe there was no heat on the train at all, we don’t know. We arrived in Messina to discover that the train bound for Siracusa, which was coming from Rome across the Straits of Messina on a ferry, was late – an hour and ten minutes late!

Meanwhile, Giorgio, our very kind landlord, had offered to pick us up at the station in his car, at 10:30 when the train was scheduled to arrive. I had to text him to say it would be more like 11:30, on Saturday night.

The public areas of the Messina station were unheated. The temperature outside was probably around 5 degrees Celsius. Ours was not the only train over an hour late, so there were a fair few people shivering while they waited. (The pic shows the VP Finance waiting in another cold train station, the one in Agrigento: note grafitti.) The topper: the washrooms were locked up, apparently being renovated. This is a station with ten platforms, the major ingress point for trains from the mainland, in a city of a few hundred thousand, and there was one set of washrooms, closed for renovation.

About 15 minutes before the revised train time, we wandered over to the platform. The train was there – we had heard no announcement of its arrival. We climbed on, found our cabin – reserved seats on this train – and shooed the family of squatters (30-something mother, two children under 12, a dog running loose and a cat in a cage.) We had barely settled in when the train pulled away. A good five minutes before the new posted departure time. Ay caramba!

All’s well that ends well. We’re back “home” in our Siracusa apartment, and it’s a gloriously sunny, if cool, day.