More than a symbol of the past, over the years, it has become a prophecy for the future. The oil lamps have been off for some time, the boiler chimney stopped puffing coal on the threshold of fifty years ago. The ancient-style "nerorosso" stands out at the entrance to the capital station, that of Cagliari, like a premonitory relic. In the land of Sardinia, the 744 locomotives, built in 1929, manufactured by Breda-Ansaldo, landed on the Sardinian tracks only after having decommissioned them from the rest of Italy. They had built them to transport oranges in citrus-growing Sicily and travel from south to north on the Southern Tyrrhenian Railway.
The waste
When they arrived on the extreme island of Sardinia in 1964 they had already ground an avalanche of iron and dust, burned coal at will and devoured endless kilometres. They will remain there for ten years, until 12 June 1974. They will be decommissioned with promises of efficiency, tracks and fast trains for the future of the Sardinian railways. For those who are superstitious, going from a symbol of prophecy to the curse of the future is a short, almost contiguous step.
It's not bad luck
In reality, however, even the amulet manipulators will have to think again. That of the Sardinian railways is a story that has nothing to do with bad luck. The sequence of events tells a different story. It is a story of boasting, cheap promises, announcements with great fanfare, trains passed off as fast that border on the primacy of the slowest, millions, hundreds of millions of lire and euros, squandered with careless purchases and arrogance by new railway workers. Little or nothing has changed in recent history: the tracks of Sardinia are almost always the same, full of curves and climbs, straight lines from the last century. A few dozen kilometers of double track and an important tunnel in Bonorva, built in the early 2000s, then nothing more. Yet, the issue of speeding up the Sardinian network is not today's issue.
Sunrise and Sunset
The summer of 2002 has just ended when Sardinia places the speeding up of the Sardinian railway network on the Italian Government's agenda. The CIPE resolution is number 85 of 29 September and states: «immediate start of the feasibility study of a further 7 interventions in the South», which includes «the speeding up of the S. Gavino – Sassari – Olbia». The timescales imposed by the Economic Planning Committee are very tight: «the resolution provides for initial information on the progress of the aforementioned feasibility studies within the first quarter of 2003, in order to start the reprogramming of the interventions falling within the 2001-2005 program contract on based on the results of the feasibility studies themselves". The key step was January 23, 2003. The technical table between the Autonomous Region of Sardinia and Ferrovie dello Stato spa gave the green light to the interventions to modernize and speed up the Sardinian railway line. A sort of strategic plan to revolutionize a large part of the route, from the center to the north of the island, with straights that would definitively mark the reversal of course, from slow to fast. The railway revolution, however, crashed shortly afterwards. In 2004 the Region radically changed its strategy, no new works, but fast trains. The new "railwaymen" of Viale Trento are convinced that it will be enough to go to Spain, from Caf, buy some trains, passed off as "supersonic", and solve the atavistic slowness of the Sardinian network. Obviously it ends in pantomime. Those Spanish trains will arrive after years and years of failed testing in Eastern countries. The result is devastating. It's a miracle that the Court of Auditors hasn't had a hand in it yet: they paid a high price for them because they had to have an "oscillating" case, a mechanism to keep the speed constant even on curves. In reality, on Sardinian soil, they never oscillated: for reasons of safety and stability, the testers imposed the blocking of the boxes, no oscillations. A planetary fool. To try to make them disappear, they end up in the cauldron of state trains, the Railways take them over, the red-white livery disappears and they are transformed into state-style locomotives and carriages. Until May 16, 2022. The state memory press release does not use the tracks to reach the editorial offices. It's lightning fast: an avalanche of money is ready for Sardinia to speed up the railway network. The time frame indicated to try to pass off the news as credible is uphill: 2022-2031. The spending forecast announced with great fanfare is one billion and 400 million euros. No indication of works and timing. Only the mission is indicated: going from 3 hours to 2 hours and 30 minutes for the Cagliari – Sassari route, from three hours and a half to two hours and 50 minutes for the route between the capital and Olbia. Ten years after the CIPE resolution, still commitments without confirmation. That press note, however, becomes the core business of electoral campaigns, proclamations for every ministerial foot placed on Sardinian soil, but the reality is quite different.
