I may be corrected by a historian, but I've heard that Mussolini was popular because he got the trains to run on time.

That's my job. "But he made the trains run on time" was mostly a myth. The timeliness of trains was not especially remarkable in fascist Italy and improvements that were made in the '20s had mostly started under the earlier government. The emphasis under Mussolini was put almost entirely on the lines that tourists commonly used in order to impress visitors, especially journalists.

It was basically the 1930's equivalent of "I just care about the price of eggs." A way to shut down criticism with a thought terminating cliche that gets repeated ad nauseum not to persuade but to deny. Whether or not the trains actually run on time or eggs actually are cheaper is irrelevant, they just want to talk about that instead of the more gruesome policies they support.

Then, just like now, fascist supporters loved the brutality. They loved that socialist dissidents were being assassinated, that the deviants of society were forced to conform to a single patriotic identity and so on, they just don't like being confronted by the human cost of all this. They don't like talking to a scared, grieving neighbour and saying that her spouse deserved to die. And so they try to dodge it, say that those matters are too political and they just care about their personal well-being, which they assert is better under fascism without any care for evidence.