The proper way to travel around in Europe is by train. Europe is a compact continent with an intensive rail service and with stations in some of the most beautiful towns in the world. Train services can range from rapid luxury like Italy’s ‘Freccia Bianca’ to olde-worlde narrow gauge and rack-and-pinion lines. It’s just a pity that so many travellers think the best way to travel to the Continent from the UK, is to head for the nearest airport.

When I was a child it was usual for my parents to go to Victoria station and book a ticket for the Continent before ever thinking of flying. Of course, rail travel was then cheaper, especially in pre-rail-privatised Britain and low-cost flights were unknown. It’s unfortunate that the pricing of different modes of travel has changed so much these days. My train ticket from Stansted airport to London (distance 31 miles) for example, costs more (£20.20) than my plane ticket from Pisa to Stansted (distance 735 miles, price £19.99). Crazy! Un-ecological and corrupt rating on a quite unacceptable scale I think…

In 1963 I did the journey travelling alone to Rome. My train from Victoria to the coast was hauled by this glorious beast:

In 1977 I was still able to reach Italy more cheaply by train rather than by plane. My ticket from Cambridge to Catania in Sicily enabled me to break my journey at any station I wished and use the same ticket to continue travelling. I remember stops at Naples, Rome, Pisa and Genoa on this, my last big journey as a single person.

Not only that. I travelled direct to Catania from Calais without changing trains! In those days there was a direct service from Calais to Italy passing through Northern France via Lille, Metz and Strasbourg, entering Switzerland at Basle and continuing through the St Gotthard tunnel. This was, of course, the same route – with the addition of the train service from Victoria to Dover (or was it Folkestone?) and the Cross-Channel ferry – that I would take with my parents to visit relatives in Milan (whose flat was conveniently situated in the same square as Stazione Centrale’s vast neo-Assyro-Babylonian pile).

It was a prodigious journey. Certainly a little long at 24 hours duration but with none of the hassles one encounters today when changing trains at Paris is de rigeur. Moreover, it was cheap with absolutely no thought of heading for an airport. The only problem I remember was handling passport checks in early morning hours at Basel and the Italian frontier when one was awakened from deep couchette sleep by officious customs executives. The European Union was in its fledgling state then and the Schengen agreement just a dream. Now of course, it’s all different except for the United Kingdom which as a result of the infamous 2016 referendum has regressed and now has to undergo antediluvian passport checks (and apparently worse is to follow with biometrics next year).

Italy remains a fabulous train travel country. If one avoids those fast ‘Freccie’ expresses it’s perfectly possible to take a very reasonably priced train anywhere one likes on the peninsula. For unlike post-Beeching Britain Italy has relatively few lines cut (or ‘rami secchi’ – dead branches) and the network is not unfairly centred on the capital. To get to Rome from Lucca, for example, I needn’t take a train to Florence and change on a ‘Freccia’. Instead I grab the local to Pisa and then transfer to the highly scenic coast route to Rome’s Stazione Termini spending a fraction of the ‘Freccia’ cost –  a distance of around 220 miles at ticket prices that can be as low as Euros 21.20…

What are my most memorable train journeys not only in Italy but in the world? I admit I have not spent as much time traveling via the Iron Horse as I would have liked to. Over time, however, I have found the following itineraries unforgettable.

Starting with Europe and Italy:

1. The Circumetnea railway.

This is a Sicilian narrow gauge   (3 ft. 1+³⁄₈ in), railway constructed between 1895 and 1898 running round Europe’s largest volcano, Mount Etna passing some of the island’s most attractive villages; Randazzo, for example, and Bronte, whose citizens made Horatio Nelson a Count to thank him for his services. And if one is wondering about those literary sisters then it was their father who changed the family surname in honour of England’s greatest maritime hero.

I remember these villages as a child travelling on the circumetnea with my uncle’s family. (He was then professor of French literature at Catania University). The narrow streets seemed very ancient and a little creepy. The inhabitants also gazed at us in what I felt were a suspicious way. Of course, everything must have changed now and these villages have become attractive tourist destinations with a thriving agricultural production of wines and oranges on the fertile volcanic slopes.

2. Ferrovia a cremagliera Stresa-Mottarone.

I am old enough to remember venturing to the top of the mountain overlooking Lago Maggiore on the original rack and pinion railway. This was closed down in 1963 and substituted in 1970 by the cable-car on which tragically last year fourteen passengers plunged to their death. I remain very suspicious of cable cars and avoid them like the plague. How I wish the old rack-and-pinion could be reinstalled! At least its former bed has been converted into a mountain bike trail.

3. La Porrettana.

This was the original railway between Florence (via Pistoia) and Bologna and remained so until it was superseded by Mussolini’s engineering project, the Grande Galleria dell’Appennino, in the 1930’s.  The Porrettana is a 99 km long single-track line and was the first connection through the Apennines connecting Bologna to Pistoia. Also known as the Central Italy railway, the Porrettana was officially inaugurated by Vittorio Emanuele II in 1864. At the time it was a work of enormous engineering significance, with its forty-seven tunnels and thirty five bridges and viaducts. The most difficult stretch was that between Pracchia and Pistoia, where a difference in height of 550 meters was overcome in 26 km of track. The undertaking was entrusted to the French engineer Jean Louis Protche who, in order to avoid a rack-and-pinion solution solved the problem by designing two railway hairpin bends in the Piteccio-Corbezzi section.

At the time the Porrettana was considered a gargantuan engineering project. The work was undertaken without any of the mechanised construction aids we are used to today: the hero of that railway was surely the navvy

By the turn of the twentieth century, however, the “Porrettana” was regarded as being too slow. Single-tracked and with severe gradients it impeded economic development and communications between the regions of Tuscany and Emilia-Romagna. A new project was, therefore, initiated with construction works lasting from 1913 to 1934, somewhat slowed down by the First World War and subsequent economic and political crises. The centrepiece of this project, known as “la Direttissima”, the “Grande Galleria dell’Appennino”, 18.5 km long took eleven years to excavate.

The construction of this railway (as with so many others in Italy: we have only to think of the fatalities in the construction of the Lupaccina tunnel on our own Lucca to Aulla Line) was marred by deaths and endemic silicosis in its workers. However, when the “Direttissima” was finally inaugurated in 1934 it created a revolution in transport links between the two great cities of Florence and Bologna, as the “Porrettana” had done seventy years previously.,

With the advent of high-speed-train technology even “la Direttissima” has become out-of-date except for local traffic – hence the Firenze-Bologna TAV (Treno Alta Velocità) project. We have also travelled on the third railway line to be built across the Apennines. It was not much of a sight-seeing experience because of the many tunnels (one would have to travel on the Porrettana for Apennine landscape appreciation, perhaps on one of the steam trains which still occasionally run on it) but it was certainly a great technological thrill.

The Apennine tract from Florence to Bologna covers 78.5 kilometres and runs almost entirely through tunnels to the length of 73.3 kilometres. Started in 1996 and completed in 2009 it’s the third railway line between Bologna and Florence.

As with that other TAV project, still under construction, the Turin-Lyon line, there have been considerable environmentalist protests since any excavation under mountains can clearly affect drainage patterns. I sympathise with environmentalists on many points but I do feel the future is with high-speed-train links in Europe as a way of reducing the complete absurdity of much-more-polluting air flights.

4. The ‘Garfagnana’ Lucca-Aulla railway line.

One of my favourite Italian railway lines is the one I take to go either south to Lucca or north to Aulla or which stops at our local station of Bagni di Lucca (Fornoli). Traversing the Serchio valley with spectacular view of the Apuan Mountains on one side and the Apennines on the other it was originally built for strategic reasons as an alternative to the coast route from Pisa to Genoa which goes through the Versilia. The railway, also known as the “Garfagnana railway”, was started in 1892 and not completed until 1959! I always love it when the train goes under the Devi’s bridge at nearby Borgo a Mozzano.

Other fabulous railway journeys in Italy to mention?  They’ll have to wait for the time being as I’m off to the river for a cool-down swim as the temps are now 37 C and it’s only just past 10 AM!

I do hope, however, that senseless air flights from the UK to Italy will soon be a thing of the past on grounds of both environment and of cost and that everyone will again travel by rail (or car-on-rail): surely the only sensible way to journey across such a compact continent as Europe. I truly hope that the time will soon come when no-one will bat an eye-lid when I go to my local London station at Abbey Wood and ask for a cheap return to Bagni di Lucca!