Advertisement

Strawberry-picking stops and Arctic Circle photo ops: Why the slow train is the best way to see Sweden

The Inlandsbanan snakes 850 miles north from central Sweden to Swedish Lapland
The Inlandsbanan snakes 850 miles north from central Sweden to Swedish Lapland

On the weekend we move into British Summer Time, Stephen McClarence recalls a magical rail journey to
Arctic Sweden during the season of perpetual daylight

Mile after mile, dense forests stretch out to the horizon: pine, spruce and birch all the way to the Arctic Circle and the Land of the Midnight Sun. If you like trees – and Sweden has 50 billion of them – this is the train trip for you.

My wife and I are travelling on the Inlandsbanan, the privately operated “inland railway” that snakes 850 miles north from central Sweden to Swedish Lapland, one of Europe’s last wildernesses.

The line, which celebrates its 80th anniversary this year, skirts or crosses innumerable lakes as it explores areas of the country little known, even to most Swedes.

Inlandsbanan, - Credit: HÃ¥kan Wike
What if the journey was as important as the destination? Credit: HÃ¥kan Wike

“We Swedes go to Tobago and Thailand and India, but we never see our own country,” says Inger Kallander from Katrineholm, near Stockholm. She adds: “We almost never go north.”

We’ve just finished lunch at a trackside restaurant, one of the regular meal breaks on the trip (local specialities: moose sausage and reindeer burger). Fellow passengers are making their way back to the train.

reindeer meat sweden
Reindeer served in a traditional Sami cup

There’s no rush. This is studiously “slow travel”, attracting around 7,000 passengers over an eight to 10-week summer season. It’s all agreeably relaxed and spontaneous.

The driver occasionally stops so we can photograph the vast glassy lakes (and the trees). On some trips, the on-board “host” may get off to pick strawberries or offer passengers a brief swim.

You could do the full journey – from Kristinehamn (halfway between Stockholm and Gothenburg) to Gällivare (60 miles north of the Arctic Circle) – over two days, with an overnight stop in the lakeside town of Östersund.

Sami camp
Njarka Sami camp is situated on a peninsular in Lake Häggsjön, Jämtland

We opted, however, to sample part of the rail company’s seven-night Taste of Sapmi package, which covers 600 miles of the route. It has longer stopovers and excursions exploring the nomadic reindeer-herding culture of the Sami, Lapland’s indigenous people (Sapmi is the Sami name for Lapland).

The Inlandsbanan was originally built for freight and designed to open up Sweden’s remote north, but was gradually phased out as road transport took over from rail. The line was threatened with closure in the Nineties, but was rescued by 15 local communities who now support it as a passenger service.

We fly from Stockholm to Östersund and spend two nights there. It’s midsummer, a great time for celebration in Sweden, with both a full moon and disconcertingly bright sunshine at 3am.

Midsummer Festival
Midsummer Festival

Östersund’s major attraction – and a highlight of our trip – is Jamtli, a vibrant parkland museum re-creating two centuries of Swedish life. From an 18th-century farm with grazing goats to a 1975 bungalow with Abba posters, it’s an enchanting place.

It may risk tweeness with its costumed actors lurking to collar you and share a bit of homespun Swedish wisdom (sorry, I’ve got a train to catch), but it manages charm without kitsch. Jamtli also has an indoor museum with stunning 1,000-year-old tapestries, bristling with the heroic romance of the sagas: the Viking answer to Bayeux.

Next day, at 7.30am, we join 30 or so other passengers waiting at Östersund station. They’re mostly Swedish, with a sprinkling of camera-touting rail enthusiasts: the Scanoraks.

We do a double-take as our train pulls in: a single 60-seater railbus unit of the sort you might find pootling along a regional line in Britain. It’s much smarter and more comfortable, though, with reclining airline-style seats. Depending on demand, there can be two or three of these units; today there’s just the one.

“The air conditioning is very simple,” the on-board host, Malin Godseth, announces. “If it’s getting too warm, you open the windows. If it’s getting too cold, you close them.”

greatest train journeys

She’s been working on the trains for six years. “So I recognise every pine tree,” she says. “Sometimes we have to stop because there are reindeer on the line. And sometimes we have people who say, ‘Can you stop, we want to pick the berries. Come and pick me up in two days.’ ”

Every few dozen miles, we pass a small settlement, a single timber house, maybe even a person. A man riding a bicycle is a real event. Hours pass, trees pass, lakes pass, snowy mountains loom in the distance.

The pace is sometimes lullingly slow. We gaze, we doze, we read. We see the odd startled reindeer, the even odder lolloping moose. It’s a sort of meditation-on-the-move. The Scanoraks congregate behind the driver’s cab for the full on-track experience.

After seven hours, we get off at a small station and are driven to an underwhelming lakeside “Sami Centre” with half a dozen reindeer, a few huts and not much enlightenment. There’s a beguiling stillness, though: just bird calls from deep in the forest.

We get a much better idea of Sami culture at the Silver Museum in the quiet town of Arjeplog (some of these Swedish names don’t so much trip off the tongue as trip it up). The museum is a treasure house of the everyday: a wooden cradle, an accordion, knitted mittens, tin reindeer toys. They create an engaging picture of Swedish life.

The nearby wooden church is a riot of golden-haired cherubs. Over the altar is a painting of the Last Supper that suggests an unusually intense Swedish company board meeting.

After an overnight stay, we rejoin the Inlandsbanan for a three-hour journey north and share a table with Stella Peterson from Todmorden in West Yorkshire and her friend Sue Stafford from Lancaster. They’ve organised their own 12-day Scandinavian tour on trains, buses and ferries, taking in Norway and the Lofoten Islands.

“We wanted to get to Lofoten by slow travel rather than flying,” says Stella. “And the big attraction of this train is going over the Arctic Circle.” On cue we reach it and everyone piles out to be photographed.

Our final destination is the town of Jokkmokk, part of a municipality that’s the size of Wales but with a population of just 5,000.

Near our hotel, with its idyllic lakeside setting, is an alpine garden where we meet Eva Gunnare, a beaming “food creator and culture guide”, for an intriguing event: a “taste experience”. Eva evokes the Swedish seasons through storytelling, singing (eyes closed, hands clasped behind her back) and – this is the real novelty – food she has made from wild ingredients, including tree roots.

There’s bread made from pine bark, angelica seedcake, birch sap juice (“the flavour of early spring for me”). We resist the dried reindeer meat. A show-off red squirrel practises tightrope-walking on telegraph wires.

A lakeside hut near Jokkmokk - Credit: Credit: Nigel Hicks / Alamy Stock Photo/Nigel Hicks / Alamy Stock Photo
A lakeside hut near Jokkmokk Credit: Credit: Nigel Hicks / Alamy Stock Photo/Nigel Hicks / Alamy Stock Photo

Eva reflects on the characteristic northern Swedish reserve. “Up here, people don’t talk; they do,” she says. “My husband’s family bond by being quiet.” Or, as another Swede puts it: “These guys are famous for saying two words a day – and one of them is usually ‘No.’ ”

We browse Jokkmokk’s museum: more about the Sami, plus a tribute to a bearded trader who was a “master of mouth agility and the first poet of the sausage”.

Next morning we take the train back to Östersund – an 11-hour journey – for our flight back to Britain. From the Land of the Midnight Sun to the Land of the Midday Rain.

How to do it

Stephen McClarence travelled with Swedish Lapland (swedishlapland.com) and Inlandsbanan (0046 771 535353; inlandsbanan.se), which offers a seven-night Taste of Sapmi package (June 12-Aug 14) from £1,080 per person. It travels from Östersund to Gällivare, taking in Jokkmokk, and back again. Travel to Ostersund not included.

British-based Simply Sweden (01427 700115; simplysweden.co.uk) offers A Taste of Lapland, an eight-night break from £1,990 per person: includes flights from Britain and train from Stockholm, seats on Inlandsbanan, accommodation, excursions (from June 18-Aug 20).
 

READ MORE ABOUT: