The San Marino railway

No, I didn't know either, but was hungoverscrolling and went down the Tim's Travels youtube wormhole.

Anyway 95cm gauge, had a nasty attack of RAF in ww2, and a bit has now been preserved



Could our Italian correspondent nip over the border to report?

 

Yes I have been. I used to work no so far from there so it was a Sunday afternoon trip to take our guests up there. It's interesting to see. 950 mm is peculiar to Italy. The line has been out of use due to COVID but there is talk of opening this year.
With fuel prices as they are I doubt I will be making the journey any time soon

 

And I'm not sure a "vaporista" will be allowed on an electric-from-the-start railway...

Good luck to them, hope it gets back going soon. Wonder why 950mm, given we blame 1435mm on the roman road ruts? Maybe export horses were bigger than roman-issue ones....

 

The cruel answer to 950mm is that an arrogant know it all, sent to look at metre gauge, convinced the Italian authorities that gauge was measured between rail head centres. The rest of the world uses the distance between the inside of the rails... And so began the endless squabbles about gauge and the inability to used standard parts...

 

Don't forget Italian standard gauge as well - 1445mm rather than 1435mm. Now confined to Milan trams though I believe.

 

Yes the tram gauge is strange as well. I thought it was for gauge widening on the tight corners. It had it's uses though.. the tight corners and higher speeds would sometimes lead to a lovely young lady toppling into you!

 

I've always felt the San Marino line -- a scenic delight -- to have had a heartbreakingly short life: twelve years or so, ended for all time by that 1939 -- 45 bit of unpleasantness.

It gets a fleeting mention in The End Of The Line by Bryan Morgan, writing nearly seventy years ago: in a paragraph in which he expresses mild regret over Europe's micro-nations having always been disappointing railway-wise. "Andorra, for instance, has no railways at all. San Marino has lost the electric branch which once served it. [Nothing added about "how come", or "for how long it lasted".] Liechtenstein happens to have the Arlberg route running through it, but never troubled to build a spur to Vaduz. Monaco simply cashes in on the SNCF. The Vatican, of course, has its tiny pontifical branch..."

 

There's some 950mm gauge (a legacy of historic Italian ambitions) still in use in Eritrea. It appears some Mallet locos are operable. Not too sure of the status of commercial operatioms. Couple of links here:

http://www.ferroviaeritrea.it/indice.html

https://www.railpictures.net/showphotos.php?offset=0&where=||Eritrean+Railways|||||90|1|||||||||||Eritrean+Railways||||90||||||||||2|||||||