STATE RAILWAYS IN ITALY.
[To TillII IETEITOR or TUE "8PECTATOR:1 Sio,—As your description of the working of these railways is disputed by a correspondent (Spectator, July 18th), I should like to submit my testimony about a section I know well,— that from Genoa to Spezia. There in 1907 the manage- ment of the line fully justified your expression of "scandalous deterioration." The trains were slow, dirty, and ill-lighted. They were frequently forty, fifty, and even sixty minutes late. It was no unusual thing for a train to be cancelled simply because the following train, due say an hour later, was so close on its heels that the two trains were made into one. More than once I have gone down to a country station intending to catch a train due at 1.30, and found myself just in time to board a belated train due at 12.35. Two rickety engines are constantly used on trains which any ordinary English engine would haul with ease, and on one occasion I saw three decrepit- looking locomotives painfully dragging a train into a station an hour behind time, and this a train which one modern Great Western or Great Northern engine would have galloped away with at sixty miles an hour. But on this ridiculous Italian State line the managers brag because they (occasionally) do the seventeen miles from Genoa to Rapallo in fifty minutes. I am well acquainted with all our English railways, and I will undertake to say that on no remotest branch of any line in England is the service half so discreditable to the manage- ment or half so inconvenient to the public as on this important Italian through route.—I am, Sir, &c.,
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