Sardinian trains: Progress is slow: "Little has changed in 40 years."
Modern trains are having to slow down on the obsolete tracks. Unions and passengers are furious: "Years of promises, but the service isn't improving."Per restare aggiornato entra nel nostro canale Whatsapp
The clock has almost stopped for the island's railways. At least, considering the biblical travel times that Sardinian passengers still have to endure to travel on regional lines in 2026. Over three hours to connect Cagliari to Sassari and an extra hour to reach Olbia. Not to mention the ongoing construction work that is transforming the entire network into a vast, perpetual construction site, holding passengers hostage for decades, forced to choose the train for travel. A small, great daily ordeal, identical in many ways to the one endured ten, twenty, thirty, or forty years ago, when travel times were not much different from today.
With the Pendolino trains arriving in 2015 and never having commuted, the new, cutting-edge vehicles are struggling with inadequate infrastructure and the investments of the Region and RFI: substantial but incapable of bringing about a breakthrough in the long-awaited rail revolution. While the island today boasts the most modern fleet in Italy, rail travel times remain decidedly far from the acceptable minimum . This is obviously met with protests from those who, on a morning like any other, find themselves in the Cagliari station overlooking Piazza Matteotti.