Now, I love the European train system. It's fast, efficient, and fun to ride. We had purchased our round-trip tickets in a newly installed ticket booth in Asti. The machine gives you a choice of languages, takes your credit card, then issues a ticket with your car # and assigned seating. No more standing in lines and hoping the clerk speaks English.
When the time nears for you to get to your train, the first thing you do is check the station's big board to see what binario (track #) your train is coming in on. You then head to your binario, luggage in hand and wait for your train. In Bologna, we did just that. The board said our Eurostar train would leave from track #1 at 7:00 PM, which means that it would probably pull into the station at either 6:57 or 6:58. We knew we were in car #1, just behind the engine, so we moved pretty far down the platform. At 6:58 a Eurostar train pulled into the station at our platform. It was a very long train and we found we had not gone far enough on the platform. No problem. On these trains, you get on the train as quickly as possible as they do leave on time. We had to move through several cars before we got to our car.
In car #1, we found an Italian gentlemen sitting in one of our seats. When we tried to tell him he was in our seat, we discovered his English was not as good as ours. So we did the best we could to tell him he was in our seat, not that it mattered much as the car was nowhere near full. By now, the train is moving out of the station. The gentlemen pulled out his ticket to show us that he was in the right seat...and he was. It was then that he pointed out that his ticket said he was going to Milan while were headed for Asti. One of us was on the wrong train, and since he had been on this train for some time, it was pretty clear it was us.
He told us where to find the chief conductor to report our problem and I remembered where his little office was as we passed it on the way to car #1. We headed back down the train with a sense of dread in our hearts that we were headed for the wrong location, many, many miles from where we wanted to go. We found the conductor and tried to explain to him what had happened. His English was worse than the man in car #1 so, it was difficult. We explained to him that we had done everything right and that his train had pulled into the wrong platform, but he was sure that couldn't be true. He got on his cell phone to make a call to God-knows-who to see what to do, but couldn't get a signal. At this point, I must admit that I was feeling a little desperate.
About this time, 5 other people came into the car from the opposite direction and walked direct to the conductor's office. One of them was a very well dressed Italian gentleman who spoke very fluent English. It turns out that he and the other 4 people had done the same thing as us. There were 7 of us on the wrong train...and to make things worse, this train was non-stop to Milan.
At this point our new Italian friend took over negotiations with the conductor. Eventually, the conductor told us to take any empty seat and await the outcome.
We had no idea what was going to happen. We had our next day all planned and wanted to get back to our Italian home near Asti. We also knew that we didn't want to spend our night in a Milan hotel. We were also a bit worried about our auto as we had left it in a hotel parking lot, telling them what time we would be back. It was an unpleasant feeling, heading toward a strange town in a strange country at 120 miles per hour, not knowing where you were or what would happen.
After some time, our new Italian friend found us and said everything was all worked out. This train would make an unscheduled stop at Piacenza to let us out. Our train to Asti was 10 minutes behind us and we could board it in Piacenza...and, as it turns out, our new friend lived in Piacenza and it was his final destination anyway. He was worried that he would have to back-track all the way from Milan to get back home, so his problem was also solved. But there was one small catch...when the train stopped, we could only get off at one particular door in one particular car. No other doors would open on the train. Needless-to-say we headed for that car and took a seat right by the door.
True to the conductor's plan, the train pulled into Piacenza, the train stopped, the correct door opened, and we all got out as fast as possible. The door quickly closed and the Milan-bound train headed out into the night. We in-turn headed into the terminal to see what track our train would come in on...and it turned out it was the same one the Milan train had let us off. Exactly as predicted, our train pulled in 10 minutes later and we boarded. I asked five different people if I was on the right train and they all answered affirmatively. Even our assigned seats were empty. We sat down and breathed a deep sigh of relief, then started laughing at our great train adventure in Italy.
The bottom line as to why we got on the wrong train was the Milan train was running an hour late, which put our train about 10 minutes late as they were both riding the same track for much of the way. It was pure coincidence that the Milan train pulled into Bologna exactly when ours was supposed to...and that it was a Eurostar train and used the same platform as ours. What impressed me the most was that the Italian train folks worked so hard to solve our problem. The picture here show Susan sitting on the train from Venice to Bologna, obviously unaware of the great snafu that was about to come.
No comments:
Post a Comment