Some train, bus and tram photos from the Nordic countries

My wife and I went on a six week trip to Finland, Norway and Denmark, with a couple of excursions into Sweden in January and February 2025. The first two weeks were part of a package tour which went from Helsinki up to the Arctic Circle and beyoond, to Kirkenes, then back down to Oslo. After that, we did our own thing, including a couple of nights in Bergen, then three weeks based in Copenhagen (I have an aunt and a cousing there, and another cousin in Sønderborg). The package tour included a train trip from Helsinki to Rovaniemi, right on the Arctic Circle, then we had Eurail Passes for use after the tour ended.

I will have to spread the photos out over a number of posts, and I won't be doing it all at once. There are also a few videos I have strung together, posted on YouTube so those will be posted as links.

After arrival in Helsinki Airport and clearing all the customs and border controls, we used the public transport rail connection to get to Helsinki centrum, and a tram from there to our Hotel (the Radisson Blu Seaside), teaming up with a couple we met from Perth, who quite coincidentally were booked on the same tour as us. It snowed on us, which was nice, but did cause us a few problems while we were lugging our suitcases around.

Our hotel room had some nice views. Of course, our sleep patterns took a while to adjust to the time diference (8 hours behind ours), so I was up and looking out of the window at 03:00 in the morning, and there were trams running past even at that time. Copenhagen lso has 24 hour public transport, but Melbourne, twice the population of Copenhagen, doesn't have any such luxury.
 

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Late night trams passing.

https://youtu.be/pGs56mUh4_w

I am trying to be a bit selective as to the number and quality of my photos posted, but there are some where I had to snatch a photo when I could, particularly if we were travelling and in motion, so no second chances. I literally took hundreds of photos, but many of them were of the buildings or people on our tour, or family, etc. Also, some of the exotic foods we were eating - things like moose, reindeer and bear.
Some of the stations were worthy of photos too. Helsinki's central station is magnificent. Our trip to Rovaniemi was to depart at 08:35, so at that time of year it was still dark, and everything was lit up. The trip takes around 8h 15m for a distance equivalent to Melbourne to Sydney. The train reached 200 kph in places, and the massive double deck coaches were very comfortable, smooth riding, and stable.

Some window views from the train.
https://youtu.be/1Z1N3LAR4js

Everywhere looks nice and clean Jeff, if a little cold.

What's the steam loco.

 

Ed said

Everywhere looks nice and clean Jeff, if a little cold.

What's the steam loco.

 

From “Post #291,880”, 26th March 2025, 4:33 am

Courtesy of Eddie B on RMweb: "The steam loco at Kokkola is a class Tk3 2-8-0 locomotive.  A large class (the largest in VR), most of which were built in Finland, but this example was built by Frichs (Denmark) in1949.  As steam came to an end in Finland, many were retained as part of the "strategic reserve", scattered around the country (often semi-hidden among the trees).  When times became more peaceful, a number found their way into preservation - including several sold abroad (such as here in the UK)."

The ex-roundhouse visible in one of the photos is near Seinäjoki.

After Rovaniemi, we were taken a short distance up the road to the Santa Claus Village (Joulupukin Pajakylä), where there were plenty of tourist coaches - I did photograph quite a few of them, but I intended this to be more about the regular public transport. I am including one here that stood out because of its bright yellow, and its rather optimistic sounding operator name, Sunshine Bus. the others are regular service buses from Rovaniemi with what i thought were quite attractive reindeer motifs along their sides. That route also served the nearby airport.

The next place we really encountered public transport was Oslo, where there were buses, trains, ferries, trams and a Metro, which seemed to be a halfway house between heavy rail and light rail. All used the one ticketing system. The majority of the buses seemed to me to be articulated, followed by boggibuses (with steering tag axles). The trams were mostly single-ended (like Helsinki's), but many of the newer ones had driving cabs at both ends. Also like Helsinki, if there wasn't a balloon loop to reverse the trams. they worked end-on with a second route, simply changing the route number and destination to return via that other path. We hopped on a couple of random trams, and chose a 12, which became a 19 at the destination of Majorstuen. We stayed on the 19 to its other terminus, which had a balloon loop.

One of the benefits was that on both the random tram and random Metro trains we picked, they went up the side of the mountain and gave us some lovely views over Oslo that we had missed out on the day before when we were doing the last guided tour of our package tour (the weather had closed in and it snowed with much reduced visibility, so we got the views the rest of our tour group missed out on). We were lucky on this day with some blue skies and sunshine, although it was still cold, of course. There's also a video taken from the tram on route 19 to/from Ljabru of parts of our scenic ride.

The Metro operation was very slick, with all routes using the same two platforms underground in quick succession. In fact, one of the lines went around the loop twice in each direction before shooting off to its termini.

At the Central Railway Station (Oslo Sentralstasjon) several different types of train were visible, and we later got to ride on a Vy regional train (much later) as well as the next day's travel on a longer distance loco-hauled set to Bergen (next post). I would have liked to have caught one of the older suburban trains (partially visible red and black set in one of the photos), but that was not to be. Also clearly visible are two of the dedicated airport trains (Flytoget) that cost a lot more than the normal local trains, and take only five minutes less to get there. We used the public train when the time came some three weeks later.

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Oslo Route 19 Tram Ride

 

Seems to be a lot of snow and not many people.

Some stunning views Jeff, it's a shame graffiti is everywhere nowadays.

 

Ed said

Seems to be a lot of snow and not many people.

Some stunning views Jeff, it's a shame graffiti is everywhere nowadays.

 

From “Post #291,902”, 29th March 2025, 8:51 pm

It is a shame about the graffiti. Apart from that, all of these Nordic countries seem to be very clean, with very little litter around.

I wish the UK was cleaner

Ed said

I wish the UK was cleaner

From “Post #291,905”, 29th March 2025, 9:09 pm

I could say the same of Australian cities, and even some of our country areas.

Following our our free day in Oslo, I had booked seats on a train to Bergen and a couple of nights accommodation there. The train trip was very comfortable, and the scenery along the way was spectacular. Bergen itself was beautiful too, although we didn't do a lot of touristy things there. What we did do was buy an all day ticket for their public transport, and rode the light rail (which has two main routes) to the airport and back. That's actually quite a long run, and all of the station announcements were preceded by totally random bits of music. We didn't choose to go on the Flåm Railway, saving that for a future visit. Our morning train to Bergen did connect with that railway's schedule at Myrdal, though.


It started to rain and there was a fair bit of wind behind it too, so we spent a little time at the shops back in the centre, found a good cafe for lunch, then hopped on another random bus, which took us into the hills behind Bergen for some good views. That terminated at a depot, so we had to find our way to a bus stop along the adjacent main road, nearly getting blown off our feet in the process. We caught an articulated trolleybus down the hill via a main road, and ended up just around the corner from our apartment. I noted that the trolley booms were down at that point and the bus was running on battery. There are no overhead wires through the centre of the city. Intriguing!


I didn't get all that many photos of the buses or light rail trams, but took quite a bit of video while travelling on the light rail. There are quite a few longish tunnels on the route, but where I had filmed through some of those, I have trimmed the final cut; I simply didn't know the line well enough (or at all!) to be able to say "I won't keep the camera rolling here."


Our return to Oslo was the next morning, the 25th January, and we encountered howling winds at the planet Hoth (sorry, at Finse!), where the conductor announced that it was not advisable to get off the train unless one had to. Finse's surrounding area was where they filmed part of the Star Wars story. 10 minutes further on the sun was out. I have two separate videos for the journeys to and from Bergen (23rd and 25th Jan).


When we returned to Oslo on January 25th, we were booked onto a coach to go from Oslo to Copenhagen overnight. Because it was dark, cramped and full, there were no opportunities to get any proper photos of the coach, and it took off more or less as soon as it had dropped us off at the new coach station just outside of Copenhagen Central, at Dybbølsbro (on 26th Jan).


Oslo to Bergen train window views


Bergen Light Rail clips


Bergen to Oslo train window views

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Nice pictures and videos Jeff.

Interesting the announcements are in English as well.

Didn't see any At-Ats


Ed

Ed said

Nice pictures and videos Jeff.

Interesting the announcements are in English as well.

Didn't see any At-Ats


Ed

From “Post #291,925”, 31st March 2025, 6:41 am

No military vehicles, but several military planes, especially while travelling north in Finland. While we were at the Santa Village in Rovaniemi, the airport was very close by and some very loud military jets were coming and going fairly frequently. The Russian border wasn't all that far away.

Likewise further north, as we headed into Norway, we go within cooee of the Russian borders.

We found that in most of the places we went, announcements were in the local language then English, even in Finland, where the official second language is actually Swedish! 

 

some great 'worts and all' shots of your journey there Jeff, it certainly gives a good idea of the weather you were experiancing !  what was it like in the various trains and trams, do they keep them very warm ? or relatively cool so your not experiancing big changes in temperature as you get on and off. I'm just thinking that everyone looks to be 'layered up' so wouldn't want to be constantly pulling layers off and on !

Barchester said

some great 'worts and all' shots of your journey there Jeff, it certainly gives a good idea of the weather you were experiancing !  what was it like in the various trains and trams, do they keep them very warm ? or relatively cool so your not experiancing big changes in temperature as you get on and off. I'm just thinking that everyone looks to be 'layered up' so wouldn't want to be constantly pulling layers off and on !

From “Post #291,973”, 5th April 2025, 8:45 pm

The regional and intercity trains were warm enough, but trams, light rail, S-tog and ferries/Harbour Buses and ordinary service buses were warmed a bit but not overly so. It saved peeling everything off for relatively short journeys.

Going to the toilet in the cold conditions could be a time consuming operation, though!!

I did try to post the next lot of photos earlier today, from around Copenhagen, but the forum loader decided I had tried to upload too many photos and threw an error message and I lost everything I had written as well, so gave up for the time being.

I have to say we enjoyed the travel experiences, and public transport in all of the major cities we experienced (Helsinki, Oslo and Copenhagen, plus Malmö and Lund) was very, very good.




p.s. Not surprisingly, there were a lot of bicycles got into my pictures around Copenhagen!

p.p.s. The cakes in Denmark were to die for, but they might be for a different topic.




 

I hope you get the upload problem solved. I have been waiting for photos from Denmark 🇩🇰

Me too

Yeah it should sort itself. I THINK there are upload limits and Jeff being a full member should be ok generally but it WILL hit limits every now and then, that should re set the following day ?