Chris and I went to Rovereto, a town about an hour by train north of Verona, to visit friends one day a couple of weeks ago.  Since we were staying in Verona, we had to decide: take the a train operated by Trenitalia, the Italian train company, or take a train operated jointly by Deutsche Bahn (DB) and ÖBB, the German and Austrian companies.

When we were living in Bolzano years ago, a key difference between the two train systems was that to ride an Italian train, you bought the ticket at the station ahead of time and validated it. For the German/Austrian trains, there didn’t used to be a ticket office in the Italian train stations, so you bought the ticket on the train. The German/Austrian trains were typically (but not always) faster on the route between Bolzano and Verona and left at times that were typically (but not always) more convenient for our travel. But, they were typically (but not always) more expensive, because it was possible to buy reserved seating to guarantee yourself a seat (which was typically, but not always, NOT possible on the Italian trains along that route).

BTW, there was no difference between the companies in terms of on time arrivals. The German/Austrian trains were NOT — as rumor has it — always on time.  That’s a myth perpetuated outside the German borders by people who rarely ride German trains. Once you live in Germany for a while, you realize that NO train system is ever really on time all that often. 😉

But I digress.

So on this particular Saturday a couple of week ago, we looked at the schedule and decided that a particular German/Austrian train was better for our travel schedule. One change over the past 3 years — i.e. since we lived in Italy — is that there is now a DB office in the Verona station.  So, we bought our ticket shortly before the train was scheduled to depart, which was too late to get a reserved seat.  However, the ticket seller advised us to go to the very last car on the train. So we headed down the platform and boarded the car reserved for people without seat reservations. If you will.

We were the only passengers who boarded that car. Which meant that for the next hour — the time it took us to get to Rovereto — we had the sense of traveling on a private train. Neat, eh? I mean,  traveling by private train is something I always joke about us doing some day.  It’s a fantasy of mine based on watching the TV show Wild, Wild West when I was a kid, where the heroes traveled the U.S. on a private train, complete with luxury sitting room car which had velvet upholstery, desks, secret compartments (of course), little lamps, sofas — the works. Our DB train from Verona to Rovereto wasn’t quite like that, of course, but it was in some ways even better than the 1880s model from the TV show since it had air-conditioning and outside temps were hovering around 100˚F that day. Not too shabby, having a train car all to ourselves, even if it was only for an hour. 😉

Of course, several days later when we were headed to Venice from Verona, it was a different experience altogether. We took a standard, basic, bottom-of-the-line Italian regional train; the initial car we were in had no air-conditioning, although further investigation during the journey revealed that a car two cars further on did (we switched to that). It was definitely a comedown from our private car to Rovereto.

As we sat sweltering in that first un-airconditioned car before the train left Verona, we glanced across the tracks. And did a double-take. You see, most of the trains in Italy look like this:

standard TrenItalia style regional train

However, here’s what we saw across the way at another platform:

What the heck?! Even the modern train we took to Rovereto didn’t look that spiffy with lamps in the windows and everything:

A closer look at the side of another car revealed that of course this wasn’t just any train:

How cool is that?! When we get our private train like in my fantasy, that’s the kind of train car we’re getting.

Someday… 😉