PISTOIA - If steam trains of over a hundred years ago continue to bring tourists on the 650 kilometers of historic railway lines in Italy, it is thanks to the Pistoia warehouse, the only workshop in the country where these old locomotives are repaired.
A sort of workshop of mechanical artisans, which will be visible to the public on 9 April thanks to the 'Open doors', an extraordinary opening day that could become normal in the future if the FS Foundation carries out the project to make the Pistoia warehouse a real own museum of historical trains.
Among these, the oldest of all has over a hundred years of activity behind it: it is the locomotive 640 003, class 1907, the oldest still in service.
In the Pistoia workshop, in fact, the trains are overhauled, repaired and kept healthy not only to be admired by enthusiasts but also to return to travel on the most spectacular lines in the Italian province.
Old locomotives are also in demand for films that evoke times past.
The manager of the depot, Paolo Dallai - a train enthusiast since he was a child, so much so that when he grew up he chose to work as a driver - explains that "steam locomotives are used for historical and tourist trains such as, in Tuscany, that of the Valdorcia, of Garfagnana, Porrettana and Faentina, in the Langhe in Piedmont,
along Lake Como in Lombardy.
But another important market is that of cinematography: many important films including Anthony Minghella's The English Patient were shot using the trains that are parked here in Pistoia ".
That of the Pistoia warehouse is still pure mechanics, it is manual work: there is no electrical dimension, much less electronic, the workers get their hands dirty with coal, grease and oil.
Nothing is replaced with new pieces, but everything is preserved and restored according to historical designs.
"For the supply of spare parts - adds Dallai - rely on the huge drawings archive of the FS Foundation in which we find original drawings of the components, therefore, many missing pieces are reconstructed from scratch".
A room in the office building of the workshop is used as an archive, with publications and documents ranging from 1906 to today: industrial drawings, catalogs of paints, nails and chains, magazines on carriages,
wheelies and rubber accessories and technical drawings of the historic trains that found their health resort in Pistoia.
And the city is deeply linked to its workshop which is more than 150 years old: the warehouse opened in 1864 for the Porrettana, closed in 1994, and then reborn in 2017 thanks to the restructuring of the FS Foundation.