The carriages from Mantova to Milan may be clean, but they're not very welcoming
I wake with a start to find a man leaning over me in an ill-fitting canary yellow suit streaked with white reflector strips. He has a big black plastic bag in one hand and a dirty rag in the other. He orders me to take my feet down off the seat. Cleaning staff going about their duty on the Mantova-Milan rail link. And it's not that I've been caught kipping in a parked-up train: it's morning rush hour and we're in mid-transit.
It's all part of the aggressive clean-up operation on this skid row of a railway line. Each train has its own gang of cleaners constantly wiping and dusting its way through the carriages, and getting the odd suspicious look from some of the more hardened commuters. They have Cleaning Service emblazoned large in English on the back of their garish outfits, signature of their foreignness on this sleepy provincial line.
Whizzy new double-decker trains have been introduced to carry more customers but they are tight on passenger room. The only difference between first- (red) and second- (blue) class is the colour of the seats. On board entertainment for bona fide first-class passengers is the spectacle of unwary second-class travellers being ejected.
There are power points for mobile devices but the supply is intermittent, coming in surges and I suspect the cause of the crash of my laptop. The loos are even less consistent, it's not unusual to find them out of order for days. The rot is setting in already.
The older trains have been revamped with vigour: carriages inside and outside uniformly glazed in a suspicious substance that gives off a blinding clinical sheen. Some seats now sport indestructible madhouse upholstery that will no doubt get lovely and sticky in the summer heat.
Large cards dangle from luggage racks with graphic images reminding passengers of the unsightliness of a vandalised train. The fact is vandalism had never been an issue on this line: trains were simply poorly maintained. What was once a cattle wagon is now a reinforced commuter train fit for hooligans. Cold comfort for the long suffering Mantova-Milan commuters.
That said, for €15 ($20) I can travel for a day on all public transport in Lombardia, a region bigger than the state of Israel, including, for what it is worth, first class on regional trains. Not much room for complaint there.