Yeah I know, that's what they do literally everywhere else in the world. You take the train to a place, and then you book a ferry, and then you take another train.
Only these italians had the genius idea to keep going with the train.
On the contrary, train ferries used to be commonplace - for decades they were a great solution to the problem when you need to cross a relatively small stretch of water as part of a long, mostly overland journey. They've gradually faded out as we've gotten better at building longer and longer bridges and tunnels, but that doesn't mean they weren't a good approach in places where we hadn't managed to build a bridge or tunnel yet.
Yeah I know, that's what they do literally everywhere else in the world. You take the train to a place, and then you book a ferry, and then you take another train.
Only these italians had the genius idea to keep going with the train.
On the contrary, train ferries used to be commonplace - for decades they were a great solution to the problem when you need to cross a relatively small stretch of water as part of a long, mostly overland journey. They've gradually faded out as we've gotten better at building longer and longer bridges and tunnels, but that doesn't mean they weren't a good approach in places where we hadn't managed to build a bridge or tunnel yet.
Passenger trains used to be ferried across the baltic sea when I was a kid, in fact they still ferry cargo trains over to Poland.
I think it's more about the state of the infrastructure, and the scope of the railway carrier, at least in this case with Sicily.
For example the railway ferries between Sweden and Denmark ended long before the bridge was built, in the 80s.