Hello and buongiorno!
It’s a crisp November day and I’m up a mountain in San Marino.
Or more accurately I’m up THE mountain in San Marino,
you can see almost the whole country from here.
Yes, thanks to lockdown in 2020,
it’s finally time for the third part of my San Marino trilogy,
and you know me by now,
the first video was about the highest mountain here,
the second one was about the football team,
so even if you hadn’t seen the title of this one,
mathematical probability tells you it’s going to be about some sort of railway.
But the problem is, San Marino doesn’t have a railway.
I had to come here by bus.
And frankly, we’re 700m up a mountain,
and even though this is the capital city of the country, only 4,000 people live here,
so realistically it would never have been worth building a rai…
WAIT A MINUTE
This is the piazza della Stazione in the city of San Marino,
and you don’t have to understand a lot of Italian
to figure out what used to be here.
Because yes, this was once the grand terminus of the Rimini to San Marino railway.
And I genuinely had no idea that San Marino had ever had a railway,
I didn’t even bother researching it before I came, it just seemed so unlikely,
and yet not only did they have one,
but here it is!
And of course, even though we actually weren’t here to see that,
there’s absolutely no way we’re not going down that tunnel to see what we can find.
What we appear to have found
is a beautifully restored 1930s electric vehicle,
proudly painted in the national colours of sky blue and white,
and with all its original interior design and fittings perfectly preserved
and wrapped up to protect them from,
I don’t know,
whatever dangers might come down here.
Weird British tourists I suppose.
But if San Marino did have a railway, then…
what happened to it?
Construction on the line started in 1928
at the other end down on the coast in the Italian beach resort of Rimini
and it wasn’t even supposed to get this far -
originally the line was planned to end in Valdragone,
300m down the mountain,
but thanks to financial deal with an Italian man called Benito
and a superhuman engineering effort involving several tunnels and bridges
and a track with more u-turns than a British politician,
they somehow managed to get it all the way up here.
In fact to give you a better idea of just how winding that route is,
Rimini to San Marino in a straight line is about 20km;
by train it was 32.
The tracks were built narrower than a standard railway, with the rails being laid 95cm apart.
For the railway nerds this is sometimes known as "Italian metre gauge",
and apart from here it was only ever used in Italy and a few of its former colonies.
But any sort of narrow gauge means you can have tighter curves
which makes it easier and cheaper to get up a mountain.
The disadvantage is that the railway was incompatible with the main Italian network
that it linked up with down in Rimini.
It was designed from the start as an electric railway, powered by overhead wires,
and when it opened in 1932 it was a pretty advanced system for the time.
It was clean, it was quiet and it was an immediate hit with the locals.
It quickly became very popular and well used.
And yet only 12 years later, in 1944, it was gone forever.
So what on earth went wrong?
***Churchillian noises***
By the summer of 1944 the Allies were beginning to get the upper hand in World War II
but Axis forces were still holding out in the mountains of northern Italy,
and Britain received information that the Rimini to San Marino line
was being used by enemy soldiers to transport weapons.
The San Marino government, despite close ties to Mussolini’s regime in Italy,
had officially remained neutral throughout the war,
and they insisted that no foreign forces had been allowed to enter their territory.
But on 26th June the British Royal Air Force attacked anyway,
dropping 263 bombs on San Marino,
and the railway was the main target.
The operation caused severe damage to the line
and killed 63 San Marino citizens.
It later emerged that the information had not even been correct.
The British government formally admitted to its mistake
after the war had ended in 194…
1961.
***Apologetic British noises***
The railway never ran again.
In the postwar economy it was just too expensive to repair it,
and the £80,000 of compensation that they eventually received from the UK
was nowhere near enough to make a difference.
In 1965 it was effectively replaced by the brand new Rimini to San Marino highway,
parts which were built directly on top of the former trackbed.
The surviving trains were stored in overgrown sidings
or hidden away in the old tunnels and just left to their fate.
But more recently,
thanks to the efforts of a heroic association of locals calling themselves
Treno Bianco Azzuro
– the Blue And White Train –
the stretch of track I’ve been walking along has been restored to fully working condition,
along with the old locomotive we saw at the start,
and it was reopened as tourist attraction in 2012.
At the moment it only runs in the summer,
(which is why if you come here in the winter you can safely walk along it)
and the line currently finishes here at the other end of the tunnel,
but the San Marino government has in theory committed to extending it back as far as Borgo Maggiore,
the same place that the trains used to make their first stop going down the mountain.
Until then the closest you’ll get to the experience is one of these,
but apparently a lot of the route has now been converted into a cycle path
so you can explore the old tunnels, bridges, and stations.
Huh! Gives me an idea for the fourth part of the trilogy…
If you’d like to take a ride on the San Marino railway,
you can find it near this extremely dramatic horse
at Piazza della Stazione in the centre of the city.
As I said it usually runs in the summer
and I hope that will be the case next year
but I haven’t been able to find anything online about ticket prices, timetables or accessibility
so if you know more please do comment below.
Alternatively you can always come here in the winter,
it seems like they leave the tunnel open for you to explore
but I wouldn’t recommend trying to get a wheelchair down here.
Anyway thank you all for watching,
and I will see you soon.