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In episode 4 of the Ripley miniseries with Andrew Scott, he returns to Atrani from San Remo, clears out the villa, and then goes to Naples and books six first-class tickets on the train to Rome. Why does he book so many tickets?

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  • seven
    Probably so he is alone in his train compartment, which usually consists of 6 seats.
    –  d4zed
    May 2 at 10:31

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In the next scene we see that he's bought enough tickets to allow him the exclusive use of an entire passenger compartment.

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He then spends the journey practicing forging Greenleaf's signature, something he couldn't do if there were other passengers sharing the car.

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  • I’ve not seen the show, but one might wonder why he’d choose a moving train – a notoriously difficult, if not impossible, place to write, draw or do anything else that requires a steady hand on paper – as the location in which to forge a signature, rather than, say, doing it in the villa he’d just cleared out, which was presumably stationary.
    –  Janus Bahs Jacquet
    May 4 at 9:11
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    @JanusBahsJacquet - In the novel he has all sorts of difficulty with the signature. He can't ever seem to get it quite right. Practicing it under a range of conditions seems like a pretty good idea, and train cars aren't all that wobbly
    –  Valorum
    May 4 at 9:16
  • Oh, I see – you meant that he spends the journey practicing the forged signature . That makes more sense; I thought you meant that he had a specific document where he needed to forge the signature and chose to do that on the train. Train cars are definitely less wobbly than just 20 years ago, but I personally still find it a real challenge to write legibly on a moving train, much less emulate someone’s signature.
    –  Janus Bahs Jacquet
    May 4 at 9:21

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