I was a very good schoolboy. This may come as a surprise to you, what with me being a forty seven year old man who spends his time writing nonsense about railway stations on the internet. It's true though. In fact, I was such a good student, I sort of didn't have to try. I knew stuff. I understood stuff. And this bred a very specific form of laziness, where I knew that if I turned in a half-hearted effort, it'd still be pretty good. I got into the habit of writing essays the day they were due, waking up at seven, lying on my bedroom floor, and writing whatever I needed to. I could've probably got a better mark if I put in more effort, but if I got 85% or 95%, it was an A either way, so who cares? I did very little revision. And I never redrafted, a habit I never ever mastered, which is why every blog you read is literally thoughts tumbling straight out of my head and onto the screen. These could be coherent and interesting if I put some effort in but - meh.
(I should say, this whole attitude was effectively nuked by A-levels, where I discovered to my horror that I was meant to do some actual work and as a result failed completely. But that's by the bypass).
The reason I bring all this up, besides giving you another valuable insight into the delightful cauldron of horrors that is my mental state, is that I think Ann Edholm had a similar work ethic when she was commissioned to do the art at Blåsut station. She could've put some work into it, some preparation and mood boards and design principles, but instead she turned up at the presentation and went "...black and white tiles?"
It's very nice tilework, but come on. Calling that art is really stretching it. Worse is that it's meant to evoke wind and the flow of air and represent movement through the tunnel and yeah, sure it is love. You'd ask to see the notes she'd prepared before the meeting and it'd be a load of blank pieces of paper and take out menus.
My path north shadowed the railway, one of those inbetween spaces where they'd put in grass and seating to pretend it was a parkland and not a buffer zone. A noticeboard had flyers for Thai boxing and a tree surgeon and someone selling their collection of actionfigurer with little pull off tabs with his phone number on them. Nobody had taken one of the tabs.
Further along the strip of green became an actual proper park, with a tennis court and outdoor gym equipment. The path rose to coast up the hill, and gave me a great view of the Green Line's depot. Here's a picture of it, because I know some of you will be into that kind of thing.
Above me were tall apartment blocks, made taller by their elevated position. One balcony was hung with the Progress Pride flag, so I raised a fist in solidarity. Huge lumps of stone erupted out of the ground either side of me, a reminder of how solid the ground beneath my feet was.
Skärmarbrink station is accessed from a pedestrian bridge, but right by it is this bronze statue. I'll admit this blog would've arrived a lot sooner if I hadn't got distracted trying to find out exactly what it was. You'd think a piece of public art would be all over the internet, name, artist, date of creation, but I couldn't find it anywhere. Fortunately Tom on BlueSky came to my rescue (oh yeah, I'm on BlueSky now, so follow me there - it's like Twitter but without the pervasive racial hatred) and delved into the Swedish internet to inform me that it's Det var en gång, by Gunnar Nilsson, erected in 1981. The dress isn't part of it, by the way; she's normally naked. I don't know if this is the work of a yarn bomber or an extreme prude, and underneath the skirt she's wearing an enormous pair of granny pants.
Skärmarbrink opened as Hammarby, but it was renamed eight years later because Hammarby is a large district and this is merely a small part of it. The area around the station has subsequently, informally, become known as Skärmarbrink, a delightful bit of chicken and egg transport naming. It's the point where the 17 and 18 services on the Green Line branch off, and so by getting a train here I could count the 18 as completed.
Hammarbyhöjden, the next station down the line and the first on the Skarpnäck branch, holds the record for the smallest piece of art on the entire network. It's a brick decoration, 30x40cm, of a bull, and it's sited in the ticket office. Or so I thought.
It turns out the station has two exits, and rather than site it in the main ticket office, the one by the shopping plaza where lots of people will see it, they've put it in the smaller, quieter one. So I came out of the wrong door and missed it entirely. I was livid.
I paused to spend another 5kr in a coffin-sized public toilet (slightly cleaner than the last one, probably used by junkies, still wouldn't recommend) then walked out of the public square where a row of minicab drivers had parked up and were gassing to one another.
Another walk down clean Swedish streets with nice apartment blocks and trees and greenery. I turned right, and realised, to my delight, that I was passing the secondary ticket hall for Hammarbyhöjden. I went inside, passed through the ticket barriers, took a photograph of the tiny artwork, then walked straight out again. I do wonder what the man in the ticket office thought.
It's cute. I hope he was paid by the square centimetre and didn't get the same fee as the artists churning out eight foot spikes made out of copper.
Incidentally I was able to walk through the barriers and back out because I had an access all areas, seven day, any form of public transport I liked in the Stockholm area, ticket. It was loaded onto my phone, I swiped a QR code at the ticket gates and got through, and it cost me thirty four pounds. We are absolutely screwed over by the cost of public transport in the United Kingdom.
I cut through another park, more a field with paths, although there was a small playground with little play houses in it. One was marked up to be a shop and the other was a police station, to encourage imaginative play, and also to indoctrinate young Swedes into thinking that the police are their friends. ACAB, am I right?!?!?!
The centre of Björkhagen - which means birch grove, and not, as I thought, House of Björk - was marked with some taller than usual buildings, a library, a Coop. It was undergoing some sort of maintenance work and so the pavements were a mess, but I managed to negotiate my way around them to find the path to the station.
A harassed looking young woman stopped me at the entrance to the station and accosted me with a great deal of Swedish. I replied the way I always reply when I'm abroad -
"I'm sorry, I'm English". It conveys that I can't speak her language, that I'm sorry I can't speak her language, and by the way, I apologise for everything the English have ever done to their country. She rightfully rolled her eyes, dismissed me with a hand, and marched off to find someone who wasn't a colonial arsehole.
Actually, I've just googled england war with sweden, and it turns out the only time our two nations have ever been on the opposite side was during the Napoleonic Wars, when France basically blackmailed them into declaring war on us. Not a single shot was fired and everyone involved seemed to understand that it was a purely political act and it didn't count. Really, she should've been apologetic to me for all that Viking raping and pillaging. (It's very rare the British can take the moral high ground in history, let me have this one).
Remember, a few paragraphs up, when I said that Björkhagen meant birch grove so that I could shoehorn in a very poor gag about Iceland's pop princess? Well, it turns out that was actually a relevant fact, as Lenka Jonesson Deker took the name and made it the basis of The Art.
She made three "birch trees" out of concrete and placed them on the platform. Lovely. Do three count as a "grove"? I'm not sure.
You can't miss The Art at Kärrtop. It's everywhere, threaded along the platform, a series of frames with coloured glass inside. Above you, beside the tracks, where adverts would go.
They are, alledgedly, letters, spelling the whole alphabet from one end to the other, but I couldn't see it. Perhaps if I'd studied them more carefully. I guess it could be an interesting game while you wait for your train, is that a V, but I was only passing through so I breezed on by.
This is where I have to apologise. Severely. Seriously. Wholeheartedly. It seems that somehow, in my rush to leave Kärrtop, I forgot to take the sign picture. I'm disgusted with myself. I've been doing this blog since 2007 and I have always, always managed a sign pic. What's worse is I somehow completely missed this fact until I got home to Merseyside and there was no opportunity for me to rectify my mistake.
If it's any consolation, however horrified you are with me right now, I'm a hundred times worse. I've let you down and I've let myself down. I promise you, I actually went there. These pictures are all taken by my own hand. In fact, if you squint at this one, you can see the shadow of a potato reflected in The Art on the right, the orange one: that potato is me.
Alternatively I have turned to some extremely expensive CGI and combined it with Google Streetview for a simulacrum of what a fat twat outside Kärrtop station would've looked like. I hope this is acceptable to you. If not, please slide into my
Ko-fi with plane tickets to Stockholm and I will happily take a photograph for you.
I have shamed myself.
The neighbourhood around the station offered an intriguing mix of society. On the one hand, a teenage boy walked past me on his way to the station with a cello strapped to his back. On the other, a homeless woman muttered to herself as she rooted through the recycling bins. I believe that's what they call "a land of contrasts".
I passed under the railway again, and disappeared into a small housing estate. It felt strange, somehow, to suddenly be in the world of low single family households after streets of apartment blocks. The homes were decent enough, a little tinny, but I wondered if they were astonishingly expensive. If you paid an enormous premium to not have to encounter your neighbours on the stairs.
I climbed the hill and was back among flats. There were two dads, side by side, walking their babies in their prams, and a heady smell of pollen and grass. A walker approached with half a dozen dogs on a single branching lead; at least I hope she was a dog walker. If they were all hers she may have some kind of problem. The dogs started straining towards me and she hissed a single word and they fell back into line.
Bagarmossen station was, for many years, a terminus on the surface, although there were always plans for it to go underground. Space was left for the tunnel and finally, in 1994, the trains were sent underground to a new station en route to a new terminus at Skarpnäck. The old station and its approach tracks were then built on.
The new Bagarmossen is a single low building on the edge of the town square, perfunctory and shaped like the descending escalators.
Underground though... well, it's the Tunnelbana. You know the score by now.
It's a single island platform and yet it's beautiful and calming. Spacious. Plenty of room to move around and travel, plenty of space to wait for your train. No expense spared.
One feature I haven't mentioned so far is that all the underground stations have a compass embedded into their floor. There's clearly something about the Swedish people that means they must, at all times, know which way is north. If you're headed below the surface and can no longer see the sun, SL has you covered. It's as though, for all its modern, 21st century trappings, Sweden is still pagan at heart.
Skarpnäck continued with the feeling of ancient magic. A cave station, The Art is a series of hefty stone benches; they could be places to rest, they could be altars, who can say?
This is, for the time being, the newest station on the network; it literally turned thirty last week. That makes it number 100, although, for me, there were still plenty to go. Still, it meant that another branch of the Green Line was completed. One more.
I cannot tell you how frustrated I am about Kärrtop.
Edited on 21/8/24 to add this correction from Tom, who enjoyed his time in the sun a few paragraphs up and clearly wants some more:
The depot was the original depot and workshops in 1950, but hasn’t been a ‘running’ depot for many years. The old stabling shed was on the left, the new building on the site is home to the engineering vehicle fleet. The Green line’s depots are at Vällingby and Högdalen; the latter is not visible from a passing train.
Thank you Tom. I apologise profusely for my inaccuracies.
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