Mopping Up

 I've been on holiday.

Don't panic; this isn't the beginning of an eighteen part series on the underground stations of Buenos Aires.  (Although if anyone would like to give me the money to go to Argentina to write an eighteen part series on Buenos Aires, feel free.  I've been watching Celebrity Race Across The World and Argentina looks amazing).  No, this was a holiday with the BF in France, and it mostly involved doing this:

However, the trip to Nice meant I didn't finish the Sweden trip write up. Oh yes, there's more!  Try to conceal your excitement.  On my last day in Stockholm, my flight back to Manchester wasn't until the evening, so obviously I had to lark about on the railways for a bit until it was time to go home.  I'll try and keep this brief.

The Roslagsbanan: Stockholms Östra to Vallentuna

Stockholms Östra is the terminus of the Roslagsbanan, the light railway that goes through the north-east of the city region and which I previously yammered on about in the post about Universitetet.  One look at the station and you know that this is the unwanted child of the SL network; it's been done up recently, apparently, but it was still basically a few platforms behind a building with very little in the way of facilities or excitement.  (I will emphasise I was there on a Sunday morning, so maybe it's a throbbing hotspot on a Monday).

With it being the weekend, I expected it to be relatively peaceful there, but actually the station was abuzz with Gentlemen Of A Certain Type.  I'd followed two of them out of the Tengiska högskolan tunnelbana station, a pair of excitable teen boys who were definitely not the type to smoke fags and drink Mad Dog 20/20 on their lunch hour.  They had backpacks and big headphones and were chatting away to one another, almost over one another, and I recognised them as Railway Fans.

It seemed I'd arrived at Östra on a day when there was going to be heritage trains running, and an unfair part of me would say, "how can they tell?"  That rickety thing on the platform above is the normal engine for the service and it looks like it should be carrying a worried defector to the Russian border in a Cold War drama.  

In fairness, when my train turned up, it was a much newer model, with decent suspension and a less rickety air.  It was soundly ignored by the Men Who Like Trains, who were dashing down the platform in search of more niche thrills.  Good luck to you, fellas.

I took the train to Vallentuna, towards the top of the Karsta line (number 27).  Why did I pick this particular spot?  It was as good as any, I suppose.  It was a small suburb.  It had a bus that would take me away from the Roslagsbanan to my next station.  Why not?

Actually the main reason I went there was so I could make this joke on Twitter.

One like.  You people don't deserve me.

A brief turn around the block revealed a small pedestrianised shopping centre with a Coop and a library, a fire station, and some teenagers being dead excitable as they headed into town for hi-jinks.  Meanwhile, I waited at a bus stop for my ride.

Upplands Väsby

This is a commuter station and is in an area that felt distinctly down at heel.  I'm probably going to get a bunch of comments from irate Swedes telling me that this is in fact Stockholm's version of Hampstead but the buildings we passed on the bus looked tired and unedifying, and the people waiting with me on the platform had a vaguely grimy air to them.

The Pendeltåg is the heavy rail network around the city, the one that descends into a tunnel to go to Stockholm City and out the other side.  It was particularly well patronised that day, as I was about to discover.

Solna

I'd planned a little trip to Solna because it's fast developing into the Stratford of Stockholm.  What was just a single stop on the Pendeltåg has been joined in recent years by the terminus of the Tvärbanan, the cross-city tram line, and is about to get the end of the Green Line extension too.

One of the main reasons for this significant upgrade in facilities was the construction of what is currently known (for sponsorship reasons) as the Strawberry Arena.  This is the Swedish FA's new national stadium (which is why the new Green Line station will be called Arenastaden rather than Solna).  It's also the home of the AIK football team and, as it turned out, they were having a match not long after I arrived at the station, meaning there were crowds of people in scarves heading that way.  I decided to skip having a look at the arena and instead went into the nearby Mall of Scandinavia to find myself a sandwich.

It's a Westfield Mall and if you told me they'd copied and pasted the plans for Westfield Stratford and added Swedish subtitles I'd have believed you.  Inside it was the same copy book of dark malls constantly curving around on themselves so you couldn't see what was ahead, facilities hidden to the side, pointless kiosks getting in your way.  Lots of glowing lights and not much actual substance.

I ate my sandwich on the plaza outside, watching the crowds push by, then walked round the block to the back entrance to Solna.  This was a lot quieter, as it opened out into a residential district, and the only excitement here was some lads with backpacks being dropped off by a very battered car.

But wait!  There is a little more.  I couldn't let my final post about Stockholm go by without mentioning The Art.

By Olle Brand, it's this odd bronze shape on the platform.  It can't compete with the magnificence of Solna Centrum... but let's face it, what can?

Museum Piece

 

Not far from Ropsten station, a short walk round the back of some sports courts, is the Gasverket district.  As the name - and the architecture - implies, this used to be the site of Stockholm's gasworks, until technological advances rendered them obsolete.  The natural response to this was to build a new district here; close to the T-bana, overlooking the coast, with new schools and facilities to encourage growth.

One way to encourage people to visit your new district is to locate a tourist attraction there, and in 2022 the Spårvägsmuseet, or Tramway Museum, opened in the former scrubbing plant for the gasworks.  It covers all of Stockholm's public transport and it is bloody marvellous.

I wasn't even planning on visiting.  It was only when I'd come out of Ropsten station that I'd spotted the board pointing me in its direction.  With the Lidingöbanan behind me, and it still being the afternoon, I thought why not get a bit of culture?  I'd come all the way to Stockholm and not visited a single tourist hotspot; what could be more on brand than this one?

Every aspect of the network is covered here.  At the top, you get a historical perspective; the evolution of Stockholm's transport, with ferries, horse-drawn carts and the like.  As you work your way down, you advance through time, with social and engineering advances covered equally.  You get vehicles:

You get architectural features:

You get pieces about uniforms and the people who wore them:

You get interactive displays with saucy looking actors:

I was particularly taken with the map gallery, as you'd expect, which included T-bana maps from both the past...

...and the future:

I mean, it's all incredible.  I wandered around with a giddy smile on my face, enjoying every moment of it.  I'll also point out that every single label is in both Swedish and English, meaning us ignorant Brits can enjoy the museum just as much as the locals.  We are so lucky.

As you'd expect, the museum is very popular with young children, with plenty of interactive buttons and videos and little games for them to play.  It was a weekend afternoon and the whole building echoed with excited screams.  There's also a tiny train for them to ride and it is adorable.

My only complaint is that the shop's a bit rubbish.  The London Transport Museum has taken way, way, way too much of my hard earned cash over the years, and I looked forward to handing over an enormous amount of money at its Stockholm equivalent.  I'd not bought any souvenirs of my trip and I thought maybe I could get a nice t-shirt with the circle T logo, or some pointless and yet lovely ornament.

No such luck.  The museum shop is very much child-oriented and so none of the t-shirts were available in adult sizes.  Worse, most of its merch seemed to be aimed at school parties with a few kroner to spend - post it notes, erasers, badges and the like.  Nothing a grown up transport nerd could spend his cash on.  In the end I bought three books, one about each of the T-bana lines, even though they were in Swedish; I wanted to buy something and I can never resist a book.  I'll have to read them through the lens of Google Translate.

When I got home I sent the museum an e-mail, politely complaining that I had a load of money I literally couldn't spend. I got a very nice reply from an Eijla Berglund, who's in charge of the store, saying that they're definitely hoping to upgrade it and will have more nerdy adult stuff later in the year.  Oh no, I'll have to go back now, what a shame.

Funnily enough, not long after I returned to the UK, the BBC published an article saying that this area was exactly what Birkenhead was after.  It named this specific district as the ideal for when Birkenhead builds its Dock Branch Park, together with its own transport museum.  The Scouse version is sadly entirely dependent on external funding and is significantly less ambitious; the article mentions that the hope is for 1200 new homes, while Stockholm is delivering 12,000.  I'd love to see this level of dense, well-built regeneration in Birkenhead, but it'll probably end up being a load of Barratt Homes and empty plots with a possible start date of 2054.  (I first covered The Transport Shed on the Dock Branch in 2021; there's been absolutely no progress since and now they've concluded it's too expensive to build and are going to expand the existing Wirral Transport Museum.  Don't hold your breath).  

In the meantime, go to Stockholm.  Go to the Spårvägsmuseet.  It's ace.

The museum website is here and it's also brilliant.