And that's the end of my Helsinki summer. Thank you for reading. It's been a long old journey considering how few stations there really are but sometimes I have stuff spilling out of me and I need to get it down on - well, not paper, but whatever this is. It was a wonderful experience and it's got me itching for more foreign cities.
take a photo with the station sign outside to prove I've been there
walk to the next one
Then the procedure is reversed. Sometimes I simply walk outside, take the photo and walk back in, but so long as I pass through the ticket gates, that's fine. The important thing is that picture proving I was there. I've done it literally hundreds of times.
Which is why it was annoying when I got back to England, looked through my photos to write this blog, and realised I'd missed one. I'd forgotten to take one single sign picture.
I'm not saying that I took the ferry from Helsinki to Stockholm specifically to go to Kärrtorp. I went back to the stations of the Blue Line to coo and sigh and take more pictures. I wandered round the city. I stayed overnight in a nice hotel. I got a flight back to Manchester the next morning at a cheaper price than if I'd flown from Helsinki.
What I will say is that when I walked to Slussen station from the ferry port, the very first train I got was a Green number 17 train going south to Skarpnåck. I traveled seven stations. I got off at Kärrtorp. I went through the ticket barriers into the little pedestrian plaza outside, stood in front of the station sign, and took a picture.
Then I turned round and walked back up to the platform and got another train. Job done.
Blogging is a dying art. You know it, I know it. Actually, as I write this, I'm not even sure anyone is going to read them. Who can be bothered reading all those words in 2025, when you can get soundbites and micro-blogs and Threads fed to you? In fact, never mind having to read at all: break out the cameras and the microphones and let's go full influencer. That's where the money is.
I've long resisted videos based on the fact that, well, I know what I sound like when I talk. I've known for forty eight years that I can write but I can't speak. The internet came along in the 2000s and gave us socially awkward losers hope that maybe we could be useful members of society; our brains were valued more than our looks. What we said was more important. Then came YouTube and cameraphones and always-on high speed broadband and you didn't need to be able to say anything any more, you just had to be pretty and boisterous and outgoing. And preferably have big tits.
I've tried doing a couple of videos before, where I played withsome not-Lego. I thought I might try to push this a bit further on the Helsinki trip. I didn't want to do the whole week as a video, but I did have an experience that I thought would make interesting content. I was going on a boat.
There's an overnight ferry from Helsinki to Stockholm every night and I thought it would be fun to take the ferry and do a kind of video blog of it. Stick it on YouTube, see what the reaction was, see if it worked.
I went to the Viking Line port at Katajanokka in plenty of time for my ship, as advised. "The gates will be open two hours ahead of sailing," it said, so I turned up two hours ahead of sailing, because I am a very well-brought up young man and I do as I am instructed. A quick scan of my QR code at an automated terminal and I was issued with a credit card-sized piece of paper. This was the key to my berth on board (oh yes, I know the lingo).
I followed the crowds up and round to the departure gate and this was where I was hit by my own naivety. I'd thought that as it was a ferry, and we all had our own cabins, that we'd be welcome on the ship any time. I thought we'd wander across when we wanted so we could partake of the delights of the ship.
Nope. Instead we were held in a tight lounge, decorated to look like a Moto service station but without the joie de vivre, with a single bar and not enough seats. Not nearly enough seats. The MS Viking Cinderella has a capacity of 2,700 passengers and they were all brought up into that little airless room. For two hours I leaned up against a column and cursed everyone who worked at Viking Line from the CEO down to the lowliest waitress.
Finally we began to shuffle towards the one (1) access point for the ship. Apparently we needed to have our IDs checked first, so the Viking Line laid on a couple of members of staff to do so. And when I say "a couple" I'm talking literally: two men checking each and every passport and ID card.
Worse, there was no official queue, no roped off route for us, so people fed into the scrum from every direction. We shuffled forwards, slowly, the time of departure getting nearer and nearer. I'm afraid I got very Brexit in my head, calculating how the space could be reorganised so there was a proper line instead of this awful European throng. In England there would've been a single file snaking through miles of rope fences and it would've worked a lot better. I was about three rows back from the gangway when a senior looking man appeared and basically said "fuck it"; passport checks were suspended and the crowds were allowed to push through, IDs be damned. If an international terrorist made it from Finland to Sweden that night he's the one to blame. I'd used my waiting time to look up the schematics of the ship and learn what deck I was on and how to get there and I practically ran there to get ahead of the slow moving throngs.
There it was. My neat little cabin. I'll let Video Me take over here:
I'm sure you'll agree the presenting and editing jobs will be flooding in from there. Can I explain that the yellowish tinge to my glasses is because of the sunlight bouncing in? I don't want you to think I have tinted lenses like Cliff Richard.
There's also a guided tour of the cabin, if you want to hear from Video Me again:
Thrilling, I'm sure you'll agree. I hope you enjoyed that because that's the last we'll hear from Video Me. As you may have guessed from the several hundred words preceding the videos, I realised that I didn't actually like filming anything. I didn't like talking to the camera, I didn't like videoing. I'd thought I'd wander round the ship filming it, so you the reader-slash-viewer could experience it too, with my thoughts and ideas, and I realised I didn't want to do any of that. I didn't want to be noticed. I didn't want people to stare at me. I didn't want people to hear me chatting to myself for "content". In short, I didn't want to look like a cunt.
I wish I'd realised that before I bought a gimbal, mind.
I headed to the main entertainment deck. There were restaurants and bars here, plus a theatre with some kind of show to keep the kids entertained, and even a casino. It was, as I said in my video, a proper ship. It was huge. I was overawed by it.
The restaurants were absolutely rammed; it seemed you'd be wise to book a slot ahead. I couldn't see any spare tables so I did my usual trick. I went to the pub.
The Admiral Hornblower promised a "truly British" experience and it certainly reminded me of a British pub: specifically The Favourite, the now-demolished flat-roofed establishment on my estate in the 1980s. It had a plasticky, inauthentic feel, as you'd expect from a "British pub" on a ferry in Scandinavia. I ordered a pint - they even had nonsensical imperial measures - and took up a spot to watch the entertainment, a little blonde man with a guitar singing No Woman No Cry.
He ran through a selection of rock classics, mostly in English but with a peppering of Finnish ones too, which the crowd sang along to. I sat in my seat (bolted to the floor) and supped my beer and watched. He stepped away after a while, and an extremely jolly and extremely annoying woman came out to launch the karaoke night.
By this point I'd had enough beers to stop me finding it hopelessly embarrassing. It was actually quite charming when they sang a Eurohit song I didn't know. I wasn't really interested in the blokes doing My Way - I can get that in Liverpool city centre any time I want - it was the local songs that got everyone bouncing in their seats that I enjoyed. This diva, for example:
I subsequently ran into her outside the toilets and I told her I thought her singing was amazing. She looked properly thrilled.
A few more songs and I decided to call it a night. I was a bit worse for wear and I'd only eaten a bag of peanuts. I decided to go up on the top deck to get a bit of air, definitely not stopping to sing Diamonds Are Forever or anything insane like that on the way. I went up in the lift and stepped out into the twilight.
Out there, away from the land, surrounded by nothing but sea, all I could take in were the skies. The incredible burnished skies. Shifting layers of colour and shade. Clouds that merged with the water.
I stood there for a long time, until I began to feel chilled; I was only wearing a t-shirt and shorts. I couldn't stop staring at the water and the light.
I went back up there when I woke the next morning. The skies were heavier now - it had rained over night, and there was a dampness in the air. The deck was slick with moisture. By now though, we'd reached Sweden, and so instead of open water there were a hundred tiny forested islands drifting by. We were working our way inland through deep inlets formed by glaciers thousands of years ago.
Behind us was another ferry. There are two companies who go overnight from Helsinki, and it seems they follow each other exactly. It's strange how, as an island nation with a legendary naval history, we've sort of lost the idea of taking a ferry in the UK. The minute aeroplanes were invented we decided we'd much rather do that, thank you very much. There's still the ferries to Ireland, of course, plus Bilbao and the Hook of Holland and what's left of the Dover routes, but these are very much the bargain option. If you haven't got a car people would think you were mad to take them.
While I enjoyed the laid back journey, and it was very good value for money, I don't think I could stand it for more than one night. Taking the ferry effectively killed any interest I may have had in going on a long ocean cruise. After ten hours on board I already felt stir crazy; walking up and down the stairs, wandering around the decks, trying to find something new to look at. There were the changing views now we were close to land, of course, but imagine being halfway across the Atlantic and all you can see is the water. No wonder people spend the whole time getting drunk and filling their faces with buffets. There's nothing else to distract you.
I packed up my bag and headed to the exit. As with getting on board the boat, this was a long tedious wait in a chairless space. We docked in Stockholm and then there was a length stretch of nothing while we watched an army of cleaners come aboard.
Again we had the advantage of coming ashore right in the city centre. The Viking terminal is on Södermalm, and it was a twenty minute walk from me along the front to Slussen Tunnelbana station. When the Blue Line extension opens there will be an even closer station at Sofia, ten minutes walk away, but that won't be until 2030. Oh darn, I'll have to come back.
Slussen is still undergoing major building works; the new bus terminal is due to open in 2026, but it's a mess of routes and diversions. It's still an improvement on my visit last year, when I couldn't even find the entrance.
So here I was in Stockholm again, a year after my last visit. There was only one thing to do. And it wasn't break out the video camera.
It's the last day of 2024. Kind of a "meh" year, wasn't it? There were enormous political changes and they don't seem to have really had much effect. It wasn't exciting culturally. Society seems to have hunkered down and simply pushed their way through it. Since the pandemic, I've stopped seeing a change of year as anything really significant; I've effectively written off the 2020s as a bad lot and I'm waiting for the 2030s to start. By which point I'll be well into my fifties. Oh dear.
Anyway, shall we have some numbers? 2024 was the fifth year of me trying to complete the West Midlands Railway map, though as I alluded to above, that "five years" has a whacking great asterisk in the middle of it to indicate that 2020-21 had a few problems. I'd thought I might be able to polish it off this year for good, but circumstances meant I didn't do anything over the summer, and I decided it was better to do it right than do it fast. It's all about the journey, after all.
This year I collected another forty stations on the map, including five of the tram stops (we'll get back to those). It means I'm at 91% of the map done, with 9% to go. Now it's mostly stations at the fringes - "destination" stations, in the sense that I have to go there and walk around then get on a train home again. They're too distant or isolated for me to walk to the next station along, or they're so far away that it's a huge journey to get there and back in a day. There's also the stations in the city centre, New Street, Moor Street and Snow Hill, all of which deserve to be visited and evaluated properly, and the last few tram stops on the map between St Chad's and Edgbaston Village. Now that I've done the rest of the Metro line I sort of have to do them.
It's also entirely possible that I could get a few more stations added to the map before I finish, as there are two new lines under construction - though as always with British transport construction, when they're actually open is still a theoretical. It could be in 2025, maybe, but who knows?
It's getting there, so thanks for bearing with me. It's a lot.
Speaking of new lines, my old stomping ground, the Northern map, has got a new spur in the form of the Ashington Line from Newcastle. That is obviously calling to me, not least because it'd mean a return to Newcastle and the Tyne & Wear Metro. However, it's another line that's still a work in progress, with three of the five planned stations still unfinished at the time of writing and having an opening date of "shrug emoji". So that's all up in the air for the time being. (There's also Horden station, which opened right in the middle of the pandemic, and I still haven't got round to visiting).
Of course, the real highlight of the year for me was going to Stockholm and spending a week larking around on the Tunnelbana. It didn't seem to provoke much interest, readership wise - you people clearly like your stations to be home grown - but it was enormous fun for me. I still get a little smile when I see a picture from that trip. It was a wonderful, tiring, exhilarating week, and I'd do it all again in a second, as soon as I win the lottery.
Anyway, the gist is: goodbye 2024, thanks for nothing much, and roll on 2025. Thank you for reading, commenting, correcting me - ok maybe not so much that last one - and I hope you'll stick with me for a bit longer. Blogging is a disappearing art, replaced by TikTok and YouTube and other visual media. I'm not a visual person, I'm a writerly one, so I'm not going to start dancing around to get likes and subscribes any time soon, so thank you for persisting with my ancient ways. See you on the other side.
And that's the end of the Stockholm summer on the blog. It's been a long, long journey for all of us. Writing about one hundred stations is a job in itself, but add in how interesting and beautiful the Tunnelbana is and it's a massive task. I hadn't realised, sitting at home with an Excel spreadsheet, how big it all was, and how long it would take to do, but I am so glad I did. Stockholm will now always be a very special city to me. Thank you for sticking with me over this journey and rest assured, I will soon be back on the branch lines of the West Midlands.
If your appetite has been whetted by these posts, firstly, go to Stockholm. It's ace. Secondly, consider buying the book A Guide To The Art In The Stockholm Metroby Marie Andersson. It was absolutely invaluable to me the whole trip and it features stunning photographs by Hans Ekestang. It also covers the artwork at other transport hubs in the city, like bus termini and commuter railway stations, plus a preview of the works that will go into the stations on the new extensions opening over the next few years. I got my copy from Sven-Harrys Konstmuseum (that's a link) and don't worry, I don't get any kind of kickback if you buy it from there. I just want to share the joy.
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?
