Is there a peak hour for train travel between Florence and Rome I should avoid. I'm talking about when trains are packed as locals are heading home from work - i 'm assuming given rome is not too far, there may be some people that train to florence daily.
Is 5 -6pm a bad time to train travel?
If you are going to Rome with a high speed Frecciarossa train, those trains have reserved seats only like airplanes, so they won't be packed with locals going to work, everyone will have his/her own seat, and nobody will be standing unless going to use the bathroom. You can't get on those without a ticket with a specific reserved seat.
There are very few workers that commute via Frecciarossa, being a rather expensive train which besides makes no stops between Florence and Rome, and there are very few residents of Florence who would commute daily to Rome, 200 miles away (or viceversa). There are however business travelers on those trains, like there are business travelers on airplanes.
If you are asking if there are times when those high speed trains have more passengers than others, I would say that the early morning or evening (after work) trains have more passengers than middle of the day trains. That is because many business travelers travel during that time to make their meetings and then return home after work. Tourists also tend to move to the next city with the early morning trains.
The only trains that can be truly packed with locals going/coming to work are the Regional trains (those that make multiple stops). Those can be packed with people standing (seats are not reserved on those trains, but are on a first come first served basis like a subway or commuter train in the US). Also in that case there will be more passengers during commute time, but not in the middle of the day
Thanks so much for that.
Is there a need to pick your own seats or are the randomly allocated ones fine?
One way to determine how much demand there is for a particular train is to do a search for your route a few days out. Look at the prices for the Frecce trains - lower prices should indicate more discount tickets being available, suggesting lower demand.
Edited to add: You have the option to select seats on a graphical display. Go to the Trenitalia or Italo website and start creating a dummy booking - you'll find the seat selection page.
Ok thanks that’s a good tip.
If I don't like my allocated seat, could i sit somewhere else thats not assigned. If so, could I just do it or do i have to wait till my ticket is checked before moving?
You would have to make sure there are no other stops between where you are at the moment and where you are getting off if you wanted to "change seats". I have actually never felt the need to change seats, as all the tickets purchased together on the same transaction are 99% of the time together (probably the only time you might not get together would be last minute purchases on a particularly busy train/day and that is even a stretch). I believe there is a spot on the trenitalia site that allows you to pick the "type" of seat (or is that SNCF? haha I dunno) and that's not always guaranteed, but I have always been with my "people". I have also never felt like my seat is "bad". Since they are long distance trains, any seat near you might be booked for any particular part (but if you are going just Rome to Florence, most likely no stops), like a Salerno to Venice train had no one near us at 6am but when we got to Rome after 8 the seats were occupied. If you don't like your seat, you can make your companion switch with you.
Thank you for that.
