Luleå; Thursday, 02 June, 2022

Our train was due to leave at 09:48, and to avoid any stress we’d booked a taxi for 09:00 to do the 6 minute drive down to the station, so we had to get up relatively early and have breakfast by 8. Just as we finished checking out of the hotel our taxi pulled up and in the end we were at Luleå station just on 9am. But as it was a glorious morning with a bright warm sun it wasn’t too bad as we could sit on the platform in the sun and watch the morning rush hour take place.

First through was the overnight sleeper up from Stockholm, which turned up a good 20 minutes late, followed shortly behind by two local trains which had been stuck behind it and were also late. So it was no surprise to find out that our train, which had to wait for all the other trains to clear the platforms so it could be shunted out of the sidings, was also going to be delayed. It eventually pulled in just before 10 and, after waiting for a freight train to come through on the single line, finally left nearly half an hour late.

The railway line we were travelling over – for the most part – is called the Iron Ore Line (technically only the part in Sweden as far as the junction with the line to Stockholm in Boden is the Iron Ore Line, but the whole route is usually meant when mentioning the line). It was built, and it’s key primary purpose still is, for the transportation of Iron Ore from the mines up the line in Gällivare and Kiruna to ports at Luleå, Sweden on the Gulf of Bothnia in the Baltic and to Narvik on the Norwegian coast for year round ice free access to the North Sea. Consequently, passenger transport plays second fiddle to the freight trains, and with long single track sections, trains are scheduled to wait in places to let freight trains pass and the timetable has a generous amount of padding.

Depending on the source you look at it is either the most northerly, or one of the most northerly, passenger railways in the world (it’s certainly the most northerly in Western Europe). Despite ending in Narvik, Norway the line has no other connections to the rail network in Norway, with that ending 300km further south in Bodø, and for most of it’s existence has meant that Narvik was served by the Swedish national operator. That was until a change in operator under the most recent round of tendering saw operation of the passenger services pass from SJ the Swedish national rail company to Vy, the Norwegian national rail company along with the sleeper to Stockholm (at the same time Vy lost the contract for trains from Bodø to Oslo to… SJ!)

After setting off from Luleå nearly 30 minutes late, and having to wait for another 20 minutes for a passing freight train further up the line, the timetable padding became very obvious when we pulled into the town of Gällivare just 6 minutes late, and with several minutes to spare before our scheduled departure time.

By the time we reached the next major stop at Kiruna we were a good 20 minutes ahead of schedule and spent quite some time sat in the station in a now mostly empty train. The journey from Luleå to Kiruna isn’t particularly interesting with the land being quite flat with only distant hills, quite a few lakes and marshes and trees, so so many trees – mostly birch – for as far as the eye could see, only broken up in the few places where patches had been harvested, you could almost work out where they would be as the trees got younger and younger until you reached a patch that was being planted and then a patch that was being harvested.

Beyond Kiruna the line become much more interesting as the train climbs up into the mountains and towards the border. After a little while the line runs alongside the Torneträsk, the sixth largest lake in Sweden and something that we ran alongside for almost an hour with increasingly fast flowing mountain streams carrying snow melt thundering underneath us and into the lake. In places the lake was still clearly frozen, with the streams creating small thawed tracks through the ice as they entered the lake.

7 hours after we were timetabled to leave Luleå (albeit only 6 hours 30 minutes in reality), we finally reached the settlement of Riksgränsen (literally The National Border) where the train made a final stop in Sweden before entering a snow shelter. Halfway along the snow shelter the walls are painted in the Blue, Yellow, Blue stripes of the Swedish flag before suddenly swapping to the Red, White, Blue, White, Red striped of the Norwegian flag to signify we’d crossed the border.

Weather

Sunny Intervals Sunny
AM PM
Warm (10-20C, 50-68F)
19ºC/66ºF