Possible fine for not validating rail ticket?

Since you asked for opinions - and you won't like this one - I'd say you should pay the fine straight out if you receive a citation, whatever the amount is. You were aware that the tickets should have been validated but you didn't do so. I think the responsibility lies with you to rectify it according to local law, since the law was broken. When a person breaks the law in the UK and clearly understands that the fault was his/hers, is it fair for him/her to expect to get away with it? This situation also points out the need to always carry adequate cash. The involvement of the police could have been avoided entirely if you had been able to pay the cash when caught out. I wonder what would have happened if you had taken the initiative to approach the conductor and explain that you had simply forgotten to validate in the hurry to board, etc. He might have been more lenient and let it go by without involving the police. Maybe someone else has seen that happen.

Ouch. How frustrating for you guys. Frankly, I'm surprised they didn't force you to pay the fine on the spot. That's what I've usually seen happen. Sadly, I would also have to encourage you to pay whatever fine you ultimately receive. I can speak for myself as someone who once forgot to validate his tickets. We had just gotten on board and the train was pulling away when I realized it. I immediately started walking toward the front of the train figuring I would find the ticket guy along the way. I made it all the way to the engine cabin where I found him. I told him (in rudimentary Italian) that I had forgotten to validate the tickets. He smiled, took them from me, wrote something on them and then handed them back to me with a little lecture to be sure to remember next time. No fine. I think he cut me a break because it was pretty obvious I wasn't trying to get away with anything. Sadly there are other people who do try to get away with having non-validated tickets that could be used again. Blame those people for the lack of leniency on the part of the Trenitalia personnel.

Yuck. This happened to us, but we happened to have enough cash. I would say in the future try not to travel with less than 100 euros or the equivalent in cash on hand The fine on board the Italian trains is no joke, and the dumb tourist act we tried cut no ice (we actually did know we had to do it and forgot). I agree you are probably better off paying up if they ever contact you.

Thank you for the responses. Rose, my previous message was not clear - further to my reading of the relevant forums and the terms and conditions on the Trenitalia website it is now clear that it was our responsibility to validate the tickets, unfortunately it was not the case when we boarded the train yesterday. I do however know that ignorance is no excuse. Strangely we never personally validated our tickets when we boarded the train from the airport to Rome on Friday. There was however an official at the airport platforms who checked our tickets before boarding. She must have validated our tickets without us realising, as there was a conductor on that particular train as well who checked our tickets and nothing came of it. Oh well, we can only hope that the police spoke the truth when she said "it's all okay"! Will have to wait and see.

Anyone know whether the conductor could have validated our tickets on-board at a fee?

I thought of that afterwards - that you might have meant you realized after the fact that you were supposed to validate. Still, the Trenitalia website makes it clear that an unvalidated ticket is treated as attempting to travel without a ticket and therefore subject to a fine. http://www.trenitalia.com/cms/v/index.jsp?vgnextoid=7661d69f1579a110VgnVCM1000003f16f90aRCRD&let=a Also, protesting the situation with the conductor and refusing to show your Passports pretty much gave him little recourse except to escalate it to his superior, in this case the police.

There is nothing to contest if you receive a fine in the post. You boarded without validation which is hard to get around. You posted "required to pay Euro 5 or 10 per ticket for on-board validation" - I have never read or seen that especially pertaining to the Italian rail. Maybe, with some other rail system that is a possibility. The one thing I have read if that if you forget to validate, you should write the day and time on the ticket itself as sort of a self validation. At least that gives you a little cover. I thought that the Leonard Express was a private line with their own set of rules.

The "write the date/time on it yourself" approach is truly an option of last resort. After all, who's to say that you didn't write that on there only when you saw the conductor approaching and knew you would get caught? Best option if you forgot to stamp it is to walk all the way to the front of the train like I did, looking for the ticket agent. It demonstrates a good faith effort once you realized your mistake. Remember this only applies to tickets that could be used on more than one train. If your ticket is for a specific date and time with an assigned seat, you do NOT need to validate it at all, since it can't be used again anyway.

Michael's advice is sound. Occasionally at a small station the validation machine is not working and there is no available staff; in that case, I look for the conductor as soon as I board the train and they validate the ticket. Showing proof of identity when requested by the police is the law in Italy, and I would think that's true for the rest of Europe, but I could be wrong about that.

Michael's advice is all good and sound, but unfortunately it's hindsight (and hard lesson learned for the next time). To return to the question asked - do Anne and her husband have any recourse if they receive a fine in the post? As with traffic citations, assuming you receive a citation, it may offer a way to contest it. It will probably be in Italian, and you could use Google Translate to help you understand it. My guess is that you won't be offered any recourse and will simply have to pay the specified amount. There have been recent posts on this Helpline stating that some European driving fines have been turned over to collection agencies, with added penalties if not resolved quickly. Not strictly the same as train fines, but they may be handled similarly. If/when a citation arrives, the safe course of action would probably be to pay it and chalk it up to a travel lesson learned and never to be repeated. I do hope that the whole thing just goes away because the police decided not to report it. Maybe they said "It's OK" because they realized the conductor did not have a means to process the fine by credit card. Fingers crossed.

Thanks again for your replies. Yes, the beauty of hindsight... I suppose that, short from hoping that the police were truthful when they said that it's all okay, the only thing to do now is to wait and see whether we receive anything by post. Sadly, if the police did however not say that all is okay and that we must pay the fine, we would have sorted it out on Monday since we told the conductor and police that we only have cards with us, and will therefore have to either make a card payment or withdraw the cash. Of course it will be their word against ours, and the language barrier will not help. Indeed, lesson learnt!

There may be a difference in the meaning of "You're OK." Might have meant that they were not going to arrest you or detain you because of the violation. While you thought it meant that everything was OK. Prior postings on this subjects from fines for non-valuated bus tickets to trains tickets suggests that the Italians are not very forgiving on this point. All you can do, is wait and see.