「经济学人」A tale of a nail

Matteo Salvini is making feeble excuses

Britain’s former railway monopoly, British Rail, never truly recovered from the explanation one of its executives gave for disruption to its services in early 1991. He blamed it on a “different kind of snow”, which repetition transformed into a trope: the “wrong kind of snow”. British Rail was broken up and fully privatised six years later.

On October 2nd similar ridicule was heaped on Italy’s hard-right infrastructure minister, Matteo Salvini, after a day in which more than 100 trains were cancelled or delayed. Mr Salvini attributed the chaos to a badly placed nail. A maintenance worker, he said, had hammered it through an electric cable.

Something like that did happen. Power was cut off to the control room in Rome on which the network depends. But a carelessly inserted nail did not explain why a back-up system failed to engage. Bouts of widespread disruption have become frustratingly common in recent months, and it seems unlikely that skilful hammering can avert more.

In part, railway transport in Italy suffers from its own recent popularity. The plush new high-speed services run by publicly owned Trenitalia and a private concern, NTV, have poached much of the domestic air traffic. A surge in tourism has made a difficult situation even more so.

The geography of Italy—long and thin with mountains in the middle—makes it vulnerable to failures of any kind along the main route from Milan to Salerno. But a long-term solution would involve building a second high-speed route from Milan to Rome, and the physical challenges of that are immense.

In 1936 an American journalist inspired another railway trope when he noted that Italians often credited their dictator, Benito Mussolini, with making the trains run on time. But, he observed, Mussolini did not. And 88 years later, there is still a way to go.

This article appeared in the Europe section of the print edition under the headline “A tale of a nail”(Oct 10th 2024)

我没有译文，仅供拓展阅读

LearnAndRecord

2015年2月8日

2024年10月14日

第3537天

每天持续行动学外语