Taking SJ to Stockholm

I'd wanted to get to Sweden without flying for a long time. Partly the principle of it; mostly that Sweden is the one country which has turned not-flying into something close to a national sport, with words of its own for it, and it felt rude to arrive any other way. So we went the long way round: two unhurried days up through Germany, a night in Hamburg, and then the part I'd actually come for, the SJ night train from Hamburg to Stockholm.

I'll spare you the German legs, which I've gone on about before and which were their usual mix of magnificent stations and apologetic delay announcements. Hamburg is where it turns into something else. SJ (Statens Järnvägar, the Swedish state railway) only brought this service back a few years ago, and there's a faint sense of occasion on the platform because of it: a whole carriage of people who have chosen to spend fifteen hours getting somewhere a plane manages in ninety minutes, and are quietly, unmistakably pleased with themselves about it. I was one of them. No sense pretending otherwise.

The night train, and a bridge at first light

Our compartment was small and clever in the Scandinavian way, everything folding into everything else, a ladder up to the top berth and a little reading lamp each. The train slips out of Hamburg in the evening and works north through Schleswig-Holstein and over into Denmark in the dark, and there is a specific pleasure in lying in a bunk with the blind up, watching country you can't name go past lit only by level-crossing bells and the odd empty platform. Marc was asleep before Denmark. I stayed awake on purpose a while longer, because I had routed the entire trip around one moment and did not intend to sleep through it.

It comes around dawn. The train crosses from Denmark into Sweden over the Öresund, the long bridge you'll know even if you've never been; a Scandinavian television series opened with a body laid precisely on the border line in the middle of it. And if you have mistimed your sleep deliberately enough, as I had, you are awake for the whole crossing.

You come up out of a tunnel under the sea and onto the bridge with the water flat and pewter on both sides and the early light only just arriving, Copenhagen sliding away behind, Malmö waiting ahead, and a carriage full of train-romantics all pretending they did not set an alarm for this and pressing quietly to the windows anyway. Then Sweden proper, and breakfast handed in on a tray, and the long flat run north with the country waking up outside the glass.

Stockholm, and the right kind of smug

We came into Stockholm Central in the middle of the morning, faintly grubby and entirely triumphant, which is the only way you ever arrive off a night on a train. June this far north does something strange and wonderful to a day. It had been light when I finally gave up and slept, and it would still be light at eleven that night, the dark never quite arriving, just a long blue dimming, and then morning had come round again before it finished. I'd been warned about it and still wasn't ready.

The Swedes have fika, which isn't simply coffee but a whole instituted pause, coffee and something sweet taken with real seriousness and usually more than once a day, and we fell into it gratefully near Gamla Stan: a kanelbulle each, the cinnamon bun the size of a fist, and a cardamom one to settle the question of which is better. It's the cardamom, every time. Then we walked the old town until our legs gave out, the narrow ochre lanes and the water at the end of every one of them, this being a city stitched across more than a dozen islands that never lets you forget the sea is a street away.

Dinner was the meal I'd been promising myself the whole way up: köttbullar done properly, in a small unhurried place that has plainly been doing exactly this for decades. Meatballs, yes, but with the cream sauce and the lingonberry and the pressed cucumber and a great deal of potato, the sweet-against-savoury thing that reads all wrong written down and is exactly right in the mouth. Marc had the herring, several kinds of it, on principle, and regretted perhaps a third. We drank beer that cost roughly what the train had, which is Sweden's one genuine flaw.

Why this one stayed with me

I have ridden faster trains than SJ's and far prettier lines than this one. But I have never been anywhere that takes the railway as seriously as Sweden does, where flying a short hop is a thing people will quietly think less of you for, and the night train is nearer to a point of pride than a budget compromise. For someone who plans his holidays around the trains, it is something like a promised land, and I went a little soft about the whole place. We took an SJ high-speed train the next day as well, the tilting one, fast and smooth and almost silent, a quiet coach full of people working in companionable wordlessness as though the entire carriage had agreed the rules in advance, which I suppose it had.

Then we turned round and did the whole thing in reverse, south over the bridge in daylight this time, the night train back down to Hamburg, the slow German days home. Four nights on trains to spend three days in a city. I would start again tomorrow, and I think by now you know that I mean it.

— Tobi