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A tale of a nail Delays on Italy's spruced-up trains have got worse Matteo Salvini is making feeble excuses Britain’s former railway monopoly, British Rail, never truly recovered from the explanation one of its executives gave for disruption to its services in early 1991. He blamed it on a “different kind of snow”, which repetition transformed into a trope: the “wrong kind of snow”. British Rail was broken up and fully privatised six years later. On October 2nd similar ridicule was heaped on Italy’s hard-right infrastructure minister, Matteo Salvini, after a day in which more than 100 trains were cancelled or delayed. Mr Salvini attributed the chaos to a badly placed nail. A maintenance worker, he said, had hammered it through an electric cable. Something like that did happen. Power was cut off to the control room in Rome on which the network depends. But a carelessly inserted nail did not explain why a back-up system failed to engage. Bouts of widespread disruption have be
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