Worst Metro

I've ridden a lot of metro systems over a fairly long time period. I've taken trains, buses, planes, ferries, camels, donkey carts, bush taxis, and motorcycles. I've ridden systems that have no maps, no signage, and no schedules, but which have systems in place to help the traveler along--usually, a guy who says "You are going to xyz? Sit here please." But never have I used a transport system with the unique mix of confusion as the Circumvesuviana railway in Naples.

Here are just a few of the challenges: there are ticket machines, but they are universally broken or unable to print tickets--so you have to stand in long queue to buy your ticket from an agent; there are tickets that allow transfers onto the Naples Metro proper, and there are tickets that allow two-way trips ("return"), but there is no indication of their existence or price; trains arrive on platforms, but are frequently late or out of order; most stations have no monitors on the platform to indicate where the train, which is arriving in front of you, is going; at the main Naples station, Piazza Garibaldi, there are monitors but they don't always match the train that is arriving; some trains are express and some are not, and the express trains bypass a large number of stations (which you may--or may not--want to bypass); there are multiple train routes around the mountain, so even if you know where the train is going, you may not know which path it is taking; many of the trains do not have signage or indications on the actual train of where it is going, which could mitigate some of the other issues.

We spent six days in the Naples area staying in Ercolano (ancient Herculaneum) which is 9 stops away from Piazza Garibaldi on the counterclockwise route, or maybe the Sorrento route (?), around Vesuvius. We rode the train every day, and every time we rode it we paid a different price, went the wrong way, missed our stop, or otherwise screwed up the journey.

Circumvesuviana system map. Looks simple, right?

The first day, Alex and Katie and I got a ticket from the agent, somehow got on the correct platform (platform 3!) and took the correct train to Ercolano. Becca and Luke, who were traveling separately, spent an hour wandering around Garibaldi before finding the right train. 

The second day, we rode back to Naples successfully, but were waived through a gate on our Metro transfer and hopped on a random Metro train (also un-signed) which happened to go the right way. On our way home that day, we couldn't buy a Metro ticket back (some bystander eventually told us to take a Trenitalia train instead) and then the monitors indicated  that the Circumvesuviana train we thought we should take would go to a different destination--we hopped on anyway and watched on Google Maps as we did, in fact, get ourselves back to Ercolano. The monitor had been wrong. We later realized, from close inspection of Google Maps, that we caught the last afternoon train and would have had to wait another three hours for the final train of the evening had we missed it.

The third day, we hopped on a train going south, hoping to reach Pompeii. There are two lines, which split a couple of kilometers north of Pompeii--we had no idea whether the train we were on would go in the right direction. There are no monitors on the platform in Ercolano to indicate which way the train would go, and no markings on the train itself to indicate the direction. When we asked a local lady on the train where it was going, she laughed and said, "è impossibile!"  In the end, the train did go the right way and we did reach Pompeii. I guess it was 50-50 and we won. 

On the way home from Pompeii, we needed to go back to Ercolano, so we took a "Naples" train--it turned out to be an express and blew right past our stop and took us all the way back to Garibaldi. In defense of the system, the driver did say, in Italian, something to the effect of "this is the last stop and we are going to Garibaldi next" at whatever station was the last stop, but the train was crowded and my mental translation of the Italian was too slow to realize what he had said. The system maps don't indicate where the express trains stop, or which was the last station, so we still don't know where we went wrong. Once at Garibaldi, we had to guess again at the platform/direction to get back to Ercolano. In the end this was about a 45-minute mistake.

Having said all this, we got everywhere we were going, sometimes a little late, sometimes with a lot of stress, and sometimes by overpaying or with extra queueing compared to what "might have been." So I guess it's probably not the worst transit system--there has to be one out there that routinely fails to deliver--but it's almost certainly the worst I've ridden.