rome's subway trains

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As with the buses, the trains in Rome run on time ok, but nowhere near frequently enough.
The Rome subway network is much simpler and smaller than that in, say, London or New York. As a rough guide, it's basically a cross-shaped intersection of two train lines, one running north-west to south-east ('Linea A') , and the other north-east to south-west (the 'Linea B'). They intersect at 'Termini' station which is smack in the middle of the city and equivalent to Kings Cross in London or Grand Central in Manhattan.

click here for subway map

At Termini train station in central Rome you can also catch mainline intercity trains to all over Italy, buy tacky souvenirs, get pick-pocketed, picked up, score a line of crack or whatever you're in the mood for. There are other smaller lines intersecting these, plus the main inter-city network, but from the tourist point of view the A and B lines are all you'll usually need.

Public transport in Rome is very cheap, so you really can't complain much, it's terrific value. Until recently they had an absurd practice of deciding children's fares on height, not age; children under one metre tall travelled free, but kids over a metre paid the adult fare. So if you had a three or four-year old who was big for his age, too bad... Weird huh? However as from this year, (2000) all children under the age of ten may travel free on Rome city buses and subway trains.

problems with the old-style metrebus ticket

Another aggravation of Rome's public transport is its ticketing system. Unlike London Transport's splendid easy-to-handle credit-card sized tickets, (or even the older, pre-1980s, smaller but reassuringly thick cardboard ones) which are neatly drawn into and out of a slot in both the entry and exit barriers at beginning and end of your journey, the Roman metrebus pass ticket is manufactured so cheaply from the thinnest possible card that will do the job. You have to fiddle about to poke it into a little franking slot (in a machine at the station or on the bus) at just the right angle, and not too hard or it will bend. This can take up to fifteen seconds if you are unlucky, which is just long enough to miss your train in, (as I have done on more than a few occasions). You're allowed 75 minutes of travelling time on one ticket, but if your ticket expires while you're actually in transit on the bus, you're supposed to put a new one in. Thus the blame for the slow-moving traffic jam is placed squarely on your shoulders. You will pay for it, although there will never be any visible improvement in road-surfacing or city-traffic-flow management. But someone somewhere in Rome will be getting rich on the proceeds from this mean little rule, and that's all that really matters in Italy.
Ticket inspectors make frequent but random checks, though the whole system sems so loose, open-ended and ambiguous that whatever penalty you may face if not found with a 'valid' ticket will very much depend on whether or not the inspector likes your face or knows your brother-in-law.

The internal clocks of most ticket-punching machines that stamp the start-time on your ticket are actually running about five minutes fast, giving you a few minute's grace, which is nice of them, but get this - There's a gross inconsistency to the system in that some ticket franking-machines are in the station ticket-hall, while others are actually on the platform. If it's on the platform you can watch for when the train approaches and not have to punch your ticket until the very last second before you jump on the train. But if the machine is in the ticket hall and the platforms are a hundred feet below, down an escalator, you'll have to punch the ticket before going down, which could be anything up to half an hour before the next train arrives - So you will have lost thirty of your allotted seventy-five minutes travelling time. Not very fair is it?

click here for more about the metrebus-pass ticket.