Hmm well I don't know too much about the railway program or the state of the railways themselves, but from when I was studying it last term I just remembered a quote from a historian who said the fascists were able to get the trains to run on time thanks to the workers syndicates, the book I remembered it from is all online actually and this was the passage I was remembering:
Quote:
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The union, or syndicate, linked the old radical aspirations to the new reactionary reality; or rather, it showed that Fascism was not merely reaction. And it worked, or seemed to. It is literally true, in 1920-21, that the Fascists made the trains run on time, indeed run at all: a remarkable high proportion of the early provincial leaders, including Farinacci himself, were station masters or other railway officials
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Page 261 here:
http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=L...page&q&f=false
But yeah that was before Mussolini actually came to power when the old regime was collapsing along with most of Italy's key services, so he had little do it and was just due to regional fascist leaders organising labour more efficiently through the syndicates
So anyway you're right I was a little off with that claim and I guess that's not really what most people mean when they joke about how Mussolini got the trains running on time, but that was what I had been thinking of