Did the trains arrive on time?

«Q
when he was there, the trains arrived on time" is the forte of those who want to underline, perhaps with a sense of nostalgia, the efficiency of the fascist state.

Richard Carr, an English historian, reconstructed the political thought of Charlie Chaplin who, following a trip to our country in 1931, said he was «impressed by the Italian atmosphere», where «discipline and order were omnipresent. Hope and desire seemed in the air." The historian tells how even the director of The Dictator fell into the adage that "the trains arrived on time". But was it really like that?

The myth began to be created in 1924, when the minister Costanzo Ciano began to spread the slogan of "trains on time", an objective to be achieved with rigorous "discipline and regularity of operation".

The need to convey a new image of the Italian railway transport system was part of a more general propaganda plan on the efficiency of the new regime. In particular, we wanted to put an end to the continuous strikes which had given no respite since the years of the Red Biennium and were one of the main perceived causes of disservice. Already in January 1920, Mussolini was riding the wave of demonization of the railway strikes in the columns of his newspaper Il Popolo d'Italia.

During the years between 1922 and 1924, a massive number of layoffs among railway staff was already foreseen among the agendas of the first Mussolini government. For these redundancies, care was taken to choose largely activists and sympathizers of the socialist and communist parties, with the often fictitious motivation of "poor performance". The objective was to eliminate strikes and exercise total control over railway efficiency, a reflection of a more general efficiency of the nation.

Overall, the image that the Italian government wanted to offer abroad was one of great management capacity and good administration. The regime focused with conviction on the railways, considering them an indispensable showcase capable of conveying a vision of fascism that only partially corresponded to the truth.

The increase in the volume of passenger and freight traffic exalted by fascism was in reality a phenomenon that actually concerned the whole of Europe, which experienced, between 1925 and 1930, an extraordinary development of infrastructure.


Costanzo Ciano, father of the more famous Galeazzo who married Edda, the Duce's daughter, was count of Cortellazzo and Buccari. He was Minister of Communications from 1924 to 1934 and president of the Chamber of Fasci and Corporations from March to June 1939 when he died.

The Ministry of Communications was specifically established by the regime in 1924, bringing together the navy, post and telegraph services and railways.

The years between 1922 and 1924 are the years of the first Mussolini government and mark the transition between the liberal state and the fascist one, conventionally started with the speech in which the Duce takes responsibility for the Matteotti crime.

Furthermore, the fascist government benefited from what previous governments had done. Already in 1905, in fact, the Giolitti government had prepared a bill which provided for the nationalization of the railways.

During the years of fascism, the mileage of the rail network had not substantially increased compared to the period 1905-1920, except for the construction of the "very direct" lines. These express lines had already been planned before the Great War, but were identified by public opinion as a fascist creation. The first "direct train" was the Rome-Naples, inaugurated on 28 October 1927 coinciding with the anniversary of the March on Rome. Work began in 1907 but had to be interrupted during the Great War. The other direct route was that of the Apennines between Bologna and Prato. Work began in 1913 but, also in this case, war events slowed down construction.

The layoffs among railway staff are not comparable to any other previous public sector reform measures. In December 1922 the board of directors of the Ferrovie dello Stato was dissolved to appoint Edoardo Torre as extraordinary commissioner who, in about two years, exonerated over 50 thousand railway workers: of the 226,907 in service on 30 June 1922, two years later only 174,140 remained.


As for the issue of "trains arriving on time", it is difficult to estimate the truth of this statement. The regime's propaganda programmatically hid or minimized any type of disruption and, in many cases, even train accidents. In the 1930s, the American journalist George Seldes carried out an investigation into the myth of the efficiency of the fascist state. The press agents - he writes - and the official philosophers of the regime explained to the world that managing the trains was the symbol of the restoration of law and order compared to the disorder left by previous governments. No one, however, ever bothered to explain that during the War Italy, in order to maintain efficient troops and supplies at the front, had split up and disorganized the railways on purpose. 

As proof of the fact that the punctuality of trains was just a myth, a fake news propagated by the regime, Seldes recorded, during his stay in Italy, a series of disservices and accidents that were kept quiet by the Italian press. It also reports large differences between the fast lines (the "direttissime") and the local ones. If the former were indeed characterized by a certain degree of efficiency, the latter were at the mercy of disservices, delays and accidents.

While on the one hand the Italian government paid a certain amount of attention to the functioning and efficiency of trains, it is also true that this attention hardly went outside the field of propaganda. Tested by the facts, compared to other European countries, the system still remained backward and deficient. 

Behind the myth of "trains arriving on time" there is, therefore, a short circuit created by propaganda, which escaped the damnatio memoriae of the post-war period and is fueled today by a nostalgic thought towards the "strong man". It is a slogan that exploits inevitable fragments of truth not critically inserted into an overall vision of the topic.

In short, the best analysis is offered by a line from Massimo Troisi in the film The Ways of the Lord Are Finished: "There was no need to appoint him head of government, it was enough to make him station master."

Seldes, in July 1930 alone, recorded the following accidents not mentioned by the press: Milan-Chiasso express train derailed in Seregano, two personnel injured; the train carrying the Minister of Justice Rocco derails and arrives very late; 22 July, Rome-Milan line derails in Tarquinia; 26 July a locomotive and 14 carriages fall into the Meduna river near Udine. It then records other derailments of lesser importance.

«It is true – he concludes – that the majority of big expresses, those carrying eyewitnessing tourists, are usually put through on time but on the smaller lines bad rail and road-bed conditions frequently cause delays».

George Seldes
George Seldes
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