Stockholm subway and tram network

This is a map of the Stockholm subway and tramway network. The red, green, and blue lines are subway lines.

The public transportation in Stockholm is actually quite good. If you stay for a month, the one month free pass is also pretty cheap, considering the huge area you can visit. If you are in Stockholm for only a few days, it is pretty expensive, though.

The trains are surprisingly non-punctual (in Sweden, being on time is considered very important and being late is rude, so you might expect trains and buses to be on time but they are very often not) and in winter the public transportation companies are always surprised that there is snow and the whole system usually breaks down. But apart from that it works quite well. There is service throughout the night too, which is nice (in Japan the only option after midnight is taxis).

Young drivers

At a rest stop, we saw a Thomas the Train thing for young children to play in. It talked a lot. When someone put money in it, you could drive around in Thomas for a very long time, completely free to go anywhere the train could take you. Which probably included into the water nearby... Luckily, the three year old driver kept going mostly around  and around quite close to the grownups watching somewhat nervously.

Train calendar with Swedish trains

Someone sent me a large envelope by mail, to my university address. This is almost unheard of, so I was curious to see who it was from and what was inside. It turned out that some guy at Fujitsu sent me a calendar. Every month had a beautiful photo of trains in different countries. The last photo was of a Swedish train, which was a bit surprising.

Söderbärke Station

To get home from Dalarna I took the train from Söderbärke station. I had never even heard of this place, but there were trains fairly frequently that went all the way to Stockholm, and that even stopped at a smaller station in the suburbs of Stockholm close to where my parents live.

Apart from the station house, Söderbärke station was fairly empty.

The location is very beautiful, though.

SJ trains

Travelling by train in Sweden is not cheap, but it is comfortable. I am told the trains have a very high likelihood of being extremely late, but I have mostly been lucky and arrived on time most times. When I rode a train in Sweden this time, it had free WiFi, which was very fast and good. You only got a few hundred megabytes for free, so you could not watch movies during the trip but you could read news etc.