"Swedish Night Trains are Never Delayed"

At least I am going to get a nice hotel breakfast before I continue my travels. So I load myself full with rundstykker, polarbröd, coffee, yoghurt, and fruit salad. Before I leave the hotel room, I get my thick jacket from the bottom of my backpack because I realized it might be quite cold when I get off the night train tomorrow. After all, I will be above the Arctic Circle by then.

I go to the train station early. I’ve always been afraid of missing a train, which would mean also missing my connection. With a 24-hour train trip and a 6-hour bus ride ahead of me, I get myself a wrap for lunch and a Kanelfläta as a snack or for breakfast tomorrow.

On the train, I heave my heavy travel backpack into the overhead storage compartment. That’s a mistake. Although I made it, I can already feel the pain in my back from the lift. I will definitely accept help to get it back down in Stockholm rather than having it fall on my head.

It’s the first time I travel between Malmö and Stockholm in daylight. The further we are going north, the rougher nature seems to get and the more it resists us humans. Here and there, the fields beside the tracks are covered with large stones that have never been removed. When we enter Stockholm, we have to cross multiple bridges, and partially, you can see the grey, rounded stone of the skerries on which the city is built. The uplifting of the land due to the absence of the heavy masses of glaciers once topping the land during the last ice age - the so-called post-glacial rebound - still lifts the city out of the water approx. 1 cm per year.

Unfortunately, I can’t stay here. I can only watch the city from the moving train and make a note in my head that I must definitely come back. Because today, I only have 20 minutes transfer time to catch the night train, and I will see no more than the inside of the train station.

I have a reservation for the couchette this time, a cramped compartment shared with five other women. I had hoped it wouldn’t be fully booked, which would give me at least a little more space, but we are already five people when the train leaves Stockholm with a slight delay. Three of my companions are Swedes, one is Chinese, but has lived in Sweden for multiple years. Like almost all the Scandinavians I have met so far, they speak excellent English and, more importantly, have no problem doing so. Just sometimes, when I’m a little too focused on my laptop, they fall back to Swedish, but I love listening to the sound of that eventhough I don’t understand much.

I try to work a bit more and find out that my paper was rejected. So I will have to submit it to another journal tomorrow once again. It’s so annoying and it really messes with my motivation to work at all. Apart from that, I can’t concentrate on reading my thesis anyway, although I would really like to be finished with this when I arrive tomorrow evening, so that I can have a proper vacation.

Instead, I talk with my roommates for quite a while. Two of them are going to Gällivare. I admit that I have never heard of it before, and at first, I don’t even know how it’s written. One is going to Abisko. And the fourth is going to the final destination, Narvik, like me. I will still need to catch a bus there, and it’s the last connection of the day, but they assure me that the night train has never been a disappointment. This train journey shows me how large the country actually is. It takes 18 hours from Stockholm in the south of Sweden to the northernmost part, and almost one day to cross the whole country by train.

In Gävle, number 6 pops her head through the door, with her partner in tow, asking if there is still a berth free in our compartment. Unfortunately, there is not, and she leaves. Was she really trying to sneak her presumed husband into a women’s compartment? You can also book a mixed compartment with SJ. The girl going to Abisko has done this before. „Can’t recommend.“ She laughs. „You are usually the only girl with a bunch of farting, snorring men“ and she reckons the women’s compartment is the better choice. „Maybe the men in the mixed compartment hope that there are at least a few women that don’t fart and snor.“ The eldest of us says, „Well, when I was in my twenties, I had some friends, male friends, that seriously thought women can’t fart. So I proved them wrong.“ And I'm in stitches.

Number 6 doesn’t come back. Looks like she found a place to sleep elsewhere. So we build our beds without her. I have never done this before, but the others show me how it works. Making a bed while kneeling on it and having 70 cm between the mattress and the ceiling is not quite easy, I must say. One after the other, we rush to the bathroom to brush our teeth and then we let the train rock us to sleep.