This is cool, but a little crazy. Why put the whole train on the ferry instead of just offloading the passengers and putting them on the ferry?
I have taken this train and it would have been a nightmare to wake up everyone at like 3am, get them and all their stuff out and onto the ferry, and then do it all in reverse on the other side. It would add at least an hour to the trip if not more.
Don't those already exist? I don't know, but I assume that regular passenger ferries operate on this route, no?
> it would have been a nightmare to wake up everyone at like 3am
I presume that if one were offloading passengers onto an existing ferry one would not schedule the train to arrive during normal ferry operating hours rather than 3AM.
I think the right answer here is that Sicily is bigger than I thought, about 100 miles across, and so the onward travel time can be significant, and so if you're going to offer a night train whose final destination is (say) Marsala then putting the train on a ferry in the middle of the night makes sense.