End of the Line

This one is pure childhood-brain fuel. I’ve loved trains for as long as I’ve loved abandoned places, and at a depot near Milan the two finally collided in the same yard — a whole graveyard of trams, from different decades, lined up on rails that run a hundred metres and then simply stop where the weeds took over. The first ten minutes were basically Subway Surfers in real life: hopping between sleepers, ducking around carriages, that giddy half-illegal feeling of moving fast through somewhere you’re not supposed to be.

Then you slow down and actually look. The cars span generations — sleeker later models parked beside genuinely ancient ones, all of them going green together. Ivy up the couplings, grass between the rails, vegetation climbing each tram from the wheels up. The windows are punched out, the destination blinds frozen on routes that don’t exist anymore, and every reachable surface wears layers of spray paint, names over names, a second skin of colour on the faded municipal livery underneath.

I’ve loved trains and lost places my whole life. This was the rare spot where both obsessions were parked in the same yard.

Inside the depot shed the light is better than you’d think — long skylights, half of them broken, laying bars of grey across the rails. I walked the inspection pits and climbed into one of the cabs: dead-man’s handle, brake, a sticker peeling off the dash, all of it still there. Somebody drove this every morning once. Now the only things moving through are weather, pigeons, and the occasional idiot with a camera grinning to himself.

One of the coolest near Milan

I’ve explored a lot, and this is easily one of the best spots near Milan — not because it’s grand, but because it’s fun, the way the good ones are: a place that rewards curiosity, where every carriage is a different little world to climb into. Urbex trams always end up as canvases, and I’ve long stopped reading the graffiti as vandalism. It’s the opposite of neglect — it means people still come, still care enough to climb the fence and leave a mark. The city forgot these trams; the kids with the cans didn’t.

I stayed until the autumn light went flat and orange behind the old depot office, a handsome little building with arched windows. On the way out I passed the front car one more time, the one the yard is busy eating, and it looked less abandoned than retired — sitting at the end of its line in the long grass, blinds still showing a number, waiting for a service that was cancelled years ago.