photo: Valerio171006, CC BY-SA 4.0 / Wikimedia Commons/Cotral MA300 Metromare
Both of my trips to Italy ended with a rail disruption after dark. Official cancellation rates are relatively low, but those figures say little about what happens when the replacement bus is difficult to find and the journey that follows feels unsafe.
"If I had a nickel for every Italian bus ride that made me fear for my life, I’d have two nickels, which is already two too many."
I have visited Italy twice. In 2024, a cancelled connection left my friend and I at a small station in Switzerland at around 11 p.m., even though we were travelling between two Italian towns. In July 2026, an evening closure on the railway to Ostia made us for a replacement bus outside Basilica San Paolo in Rome. The journey planners showed a bus approaching. We waited where they directed us, but nothing came.
For this article, I checked official information from Cotral, TILO, Trenord and Trenitalia. The figures do not support the idea that Italian trains are constantly being cancelled. They do, however, show why a relatively small disruption can become a serious problem when passengers receive little practical help on the ground.
Metromare to Ostia Stopped Running at 9 p.m.
During my recent visit to Rome, we planned to travel to Ostia by taking Metro Line B and changing to the Metromare railway at Basilica San Paolo. When we reached the station, the trains towards the coast were no longer running.
The displays and mobile applications directed passengers towards a replacement bus under the name FC2, showed in Moovit and MooneyGo. Both applications showed it approaching a nearby stop, so we followed the route on the map and waited there, but no bus arrived.
We could not find any clear sign showing where replacement passengers should wait, which side of the station served buses towards Ostia or whether the stop shown in the applications was correct. There was also no member of staff outside who could explain the arrangement, and even locals were sorry to tell us they had no idea where we could find the bus.
The disruption turned out to be part of a scheduled closure. According to Cotral’s official Metromare information, the last weekday trains leave Porta San Paolo and Cristoforo Colombo at 21:00 because of night-time infrastructure renewal works. Replacement buses are then scheduled from 21:15 in the direction of Ostia and from 21:30 towards Rome, with services continuing until 23:30.
Cotral states that these buses stop near every railway station. At Basilica San Paolo, the operator lists ATAC stop 71920 towards Cristoforo Colombo and stop 71906 towards Porta San Paolo. The information is available online, but a stop number is not very useful to a visitor who does not know Rome’s numbering system and cannot see a physical sign connecting that number to the replacement service.
After waiting without seeing the bus indicated by the applications, we returned to the metro, travelled to Laurentina and took a regular bus from there towards Ostia. The official alternative may have been operating somewhere along the route, but from where we were standing, there was no clear way to find it.
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In 2024, the Journey Ended in Switzerland
The first incident happened during my previous trip to Italy in 2024. We were travelling from Como to Induno Olona, near Varese.
The route can involve the cross-border S40 service, which connects Como and Varese through Mendrisio in Switzerland. A journey that starts and ends in Italy can therefore leave passengers on the Swiss side of the border when a connection is disrupted. TILO describes the S40 as an hourly regional service between Como, Mendrisio and Varese from Monday to Saturday.
At around 11 p.m., our onward train was cancelled and we were left waiting at a small Swiss station. There was nowhere comfortable to sit, little practical assistance and no obvious way to finish the journey late at night.
Trenord reported that just over 20,000 of its 776,000 scheduled services were cancelled in 2024. That equals 2.5% of planned trains, or an average of 57 cancellations per day. Nearly half were linked to 15 strikes during the year. Trenord attributed 32% to the railway operator, just over 7% to infrastructure failures and 11% to external causes other than strikes.
Even if a cancellation rate of 2.5% looks manageable in a company report, it feels very different when the cancelled service is one of the final connections of the evening.
How Often Are Trains Cancelled in Italy?
In its 2025 service quality report, Trenitalia recorded cancellation rates of 1.1% for regional trains, 0.6% for international services and 0.4% for medium- and long-distance trains. The report says that cancellations attributed to external causes were excluded.
The 2024 report had the regional rate of 1.4%, but that number included full and partial cancellations without exclusions. It would therefore be misleading to use the two percentages alone as evidence that performance improved.
The complaints data comes closer to the issue RAILTARGET found. Trenitalia received 44,066 complaints concerning regional services in 2025. Among the recorded problems, 17,311 concerned delays, missed connections and cancellations. There were also 536 complaints about information during delays or cancellations, 306 about assistance and 371 concerning alternative transport or reimbursement.
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The Bus Ride Feels Like the Bigger Risk
Once we finally found a bus from Laurentina towards Ostia, the problem changed. The vehicle travelled quickly along major roads and took some bends at a pace that made me brace myself in the seat.
I had experienced the same feeling two years earlier on a bus from Bellagio. The roads around Lake Como can be narrow, steep and close to sharp drops. During that journey, the driver appeared to slow very little before some bends, and I spent much of the trip feeling that the vehicle might overturn.
I cannot claim that either driver exceeded the legal speed limit as there was no way to record the speedometer or collect GPS data. What I can say is that the driving style made me genuinely fear for my safety on both journeys.
Under Article 142 of Italy’s Highway Code, buses and trolleybuses with a fully loaded weight above eight tonnes are limited to 80 km/h outside built-up areas and 100 km/h on motorways. Those limits do not mean that 80 km/h is appropriate on every non-urban road. Article 141 requires drivers to adjust their speed to the vehicle, traffic, visibility and road conditions. It specifically refers to bends, steep descents, narrow sections, limited visibility and night-time driving.
National road-safety data cannot tell us how either of these buses was being driven. It does show that speed remains a wider concern. Italy recorded 173,364 road accidents involving injuries in 2024, according to ISTAT. Excessive or inappropriate speed accounted for 11.2% of recorded or presumed driver-related causes on non-urban roads.
A Replacement Service Has to Be Possible to Find
Transport services are interrupted for many reasons. Infrastructure needs repairs, vehicles fail and strikes affect timetables. The passenger cannot expect every scheduled journey to operate without a problem. However, it is reasonable to expect clear instructions when the original service stops.
A replacement bus needs more than a line in an online timetable. Passengers should be able to leave the station and see where the bus stops, which direction it serves and when it is expected to arrive. Live information should show the vehicle’s actual position rather than leave people waiting for a bus that may be somewhere else.
EU rail passenger rules give travellers several options when a cancelled train is expected to delay arrival by more than 60 minutes, including reimbursement or rerouting under comparable conditions. When the railway company does not provide rerouting information within 100 minutes, passengers can arrange reasonable alternative public transport by rail, coach or bus and request reimbursement of the necessary cost. The exact application depends on the ticket and journey involved.
Rules on reimbursement matter, but they do not solve the immediate problem of standing outside an unfamiliar station late at night with no clear idea where to go.
Both of my trips eventually continued. We found another route, waited longer than planned and reached our destination. That does not, of course, make the experience a transport disaster. What it does, though, is show how quickly a minor percentage in an annual report can turn into a difficult night for the passenger whose train is included in it.
Two nickels are not much, but I would still prefer not to earn a third.