Il treno arriva all’orario

After the First World War, the ailing Italian railway system received new investment. The claim was, according to biographer Denis Mack Smith in Mussolini, that during the 1920s ‘Italian trains were the envy of all Europe’ as ‘Mussolini did his best to make the train service into a symbol of fascist efficiency.’ The alleged improvement was noticed by the Infanta Eulalia of Spain who, in her 1925 book Courts and Countries after the War, suggests that ‘the first benefit of Benito Mussolini’s direction in Italy begins to be felt when one crosses the Italian Frontier and hears “Il treno arriva all’orario.” [“The train is arriving on time.”] Indeed, The Oxford Dictionary of Modern Quotations describes Mussolini famously instructing a stationmaster ‘We must leave exactly on time… From now on everything must function to perfection.”
However, as is common with many politicians, the execution of high ideals often results in a triumph of appearance over achievement. According to Peter Neville in Mussolini, ‘the groundwork on the railways had in fact been carried out before 1922,’ the year that Mussolini came to power. Even with the supposed improvements, Mack Smith reveals that ‘some travellers reported that the celebrated trains running invariably on time were, to some extent at least, a convenient myth’. In The Golden Age Is In Us, Alexander Cockburn quotes US investigates journalist George Seldes in 1936, reporting that ‘while the big express trains were mostly on schedule (though other travellers disputed even this) the local trains had huge delays.’
Cockburn suggests that ‘millions of commuters round the world laud Il Duce’s memory’ simply because ‘Mussolini’s PR men fanned the legend’. Mack Smith agrees that Mussolini’s ‘propaganda was very succesful’, while Neville gives railway efficiency improvement as one example of Mussolini’s spectacular over-hyped success’. What is more, Cockburn claims that ‘Mussolini also took care to ban all reporting of railway accidents and delays.’ When it came to improving the railways, it would appear that the only thing Mussolini really succeded in doing was hoodwinking the Spanish Infanta.

Benito Mussolini made the trains run on time
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