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I review Europe’s last great sleeper train, from Stockholm to Kiruna in Lapland

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Happy Easter!  As today will be a quiet day on the site I thought I would share a few highlights from our 15 hour train ride last week from Stockholm to Kiruna in (Swedish) Lapland.

Just before we set off I saw a magazine article which called this the greatest sleeper train trip in Europe.  If that is the case, it is more a case of ‘last man standing’ than anything else.

How you feel about sleeper trains will depend on your age.  If you are 40+ then you probably have some experience of taking sleeper trains around Europe.  I still have vivid memories of travelling to Berlin and Prague like this – waking up to find myself in Berlin in 1990, in the middle of a snowfall, when the wall had just come down, was a magical experience.

Those days have gone.  Deutsche Bahn was the biggest operator and it stopped its sleeper services in 2016.  Austrian Railways picked up some of the slack, buying and refurbishing some of the DB rolling stock, but the budget airlines had already changed the market for ever.

I am guessing that most HfP readers under 30 have never seen, yet alone been on, a European sleeper train.  They are probably struggling to think of a good reason why they would want to share a compartment with five strangers for the night for the same, or more, money as a flight.

Click on any of the pictures to enlarge slightly.

Review Stockholm to Kiruna Narvik Lapland sleeper train

Let’s start with the facts.  The Lapland train leaves Stockholm Central at 18.10 and arrives in Kiruna at 09.24.  It carries on to Narvik in Norway.

We chose to fly to Stockholm the night before, getting the evening BA flight and then the Arlanda Express train into the centre.  This was my first experience of the ‘longer route’ Club Europe catering since it was redesigned and I was genuinely impressed – well done BA.

We stayed at the Radisson Blu Royal Viking which is attached to Central Station, but which has very small rooms.  The state of the ‘refurbished’ Business Rooms make me worry how bad the unrefurbished standard rooms would be.  Instead, I recommend the brand new Scandic Continental next door which is where we stayed when we returned to Stockholm five days later, cancelling a 2nd Royal Viking reservation.  I will do an article on the Scandic Friends loyalty scheme in a few days.

Review Stockholm to Kiruna Narvik Lapland sleeper train

Next day, we left our luggage at the Royal Viking and went off exploring in Stockholm.  Early evening we collected our cases and did the 10 second walk back into the station.

Review Stockholm to Kiruna Narvik Lapland sleeper train

Cabins are 6-berth but anyone booking four or more seats gets a private compartment.  We paid 3,445 SEK (£295) for the four of us.  Bedding is provided but no food, except for six cartons of water.

Max Burgess and Molly Burgess

Let me explain how this works.  The two top beds can be seen in the top picture.  The back of the seats flips up, creating the middle bed.  This leaves the base of the seating to provide the lower bed.

A ladder is available if you use the top bunk, which we didn’t.  There are straps to secure the occupant of the middle bunk:

Molly Burgess

This reminded me, 100%, of the sleeper trains I used in the early 1990’s.  And not in a good way.  The rolling stock did not seem 30 years old but nothing has changed in terms of design.  My wife and I each managed about three hours sleep at best, although the kids were out like a light.

Review Stockholm to Kiruna Narvik Lapland sleeper train

Food is via the restaurant car.  Oddly, this was swapped over during the night.  Totally swapped over – the old restaurant car was removed and a replacement, with a different layout, installed in its place!  This was a bit of a surprise in the morning.

The food offering was very average indeed.  The photo below makes the selection look better than it was.  The buffet and the train as a whole was not ‘English friendly’ – even the leaflet in the cabin was entirely in Swedish apart from a line saying ‘Ask the crew if you speak English and need to know anything’.  This is very unusual for Sweden.

Review Stockholm to Kiruna Narvik Lapland sleeper train

Here’s the seating in the 2nd (morning) restaurant car:

Review Stockholm to Kiruna Narvik Lapland sleeper train

Whilst 15 hours is a very long time to spend on the train, especially when you only manage about three hours sleep, it passed fairly quickly.  This was mainly because the kids did go to sleep so we had to turn the lights out and couldn’t do much except lay down and wonder why we couldn’t sleep ….

It was a shame that London had been unusually cold and snowy in the previous weeks.  When we planned this it was on the basis that the kids would like to experience winter …. but we’d all had enough of that in London!

I’m not going to review our hotel in Kiruna, Camp Ripan, but do let me know if you have any specific questions.  You are substantially north of the Arctic Circle here and it is a base for anyone looking for a wide range of winter activities.

What you don’t see from the pictures is that it is very much on the edge of the town – not remote – and overlooked by five very high apartment blocks!  On the upside, it means you can walk into Kiruna’s town centre in 10 minutes.

Review Stockholm to Kiruna Narvik Lapland sleeper train

This was our ‘hut’ as we called it (memories of Auf Wiedersehen Pet!) which was about £200 per night including breakfast.  It slept four with bunk beds in a separate bedroom for the kids.  Food, except breakfast, was unbelievably good – you really don’t expect high end cuisine at a place like this.

Lots of outdoor activities can be booked – we did husky sleigh riding on a frozen late (short video on our Instagram channel) and snow shoe walking.  I wrote about our visit to the Icehotel here.

Review Stockholm to Kiruna Narvik Lapland sleeper train

Having left the arrangements for this trip to my wife, I knew nothing about Kiruna.  It is a fascinating place.  The biggest underground iron ore mine in the world is in Kiruna and tours are available.  It dominates the town.

More importantly, it is destroying the town.  Much of the centre is collapsing and most of it is being moved 3km down the road.  The first buildings of the new city are starting to emerge.  Historic buildings will be lifted up and moved and large chunks of housing will be demolished.  Camp Ripan is safe but it, and the adjacent housing blocks, will be 3km and not 300m from the high street in 15 years.

Review Stockholm to Kiruna Narvik Lapland sleeper train

After four nights at Camp Ripan we headed back to Stockholm ….. by plane.  Kiruna has its own airport with a grand total of three flights per day, served by SAS and, in season, Norwegian.

The Norwegian one-way flight back was the same price as the train up, but took 13 hours less.   Norwegian did a decent job – brand new Boeing 737-8, what felt like decent leg room, comfortable (for 80 minutes) Recaro slimline seating, cheap (by Swedish standards) food and drink and the new design ‘extra deep’ luggage bins which worked well.  No luxury but no complaints.

Comments (89)

This article is closed to new comments. Feel free to ask your question in the HfP forums.

  • Nick Burch says:

    The Radisson Blu Royal Park hotel is a little way out of the centre of Stockholm, but lovely! Airport bus stops 5 mins walk away, local bus to town outside, in a huge park, great food and nice views.

    We used to take the sleeper from Paris to Bourg to ski, before SNCF axed the route. Going out was tough to sleep enough, coming back we’d sleep solidly the whole way! Doing a load of exercise before trying the sleeper is to be recommended 🙂

    • Leo says:

      I did that train once – and only one way. We were so horrified that the 3 of us dumped the returns and flew home. It was basically carnage.

  • Frenske says:

    It is a good time to go to Scandinavia for holidays. After the equinox they have more day light than us and you can get iften clear weather good for cross-country skiing, etc.

    • David says:

      It’ll still cost a tenner for a beer though!

    • Trystan says:

      Had some great cross country skiing trips this time of the year in Ylläs having taken the sleeper train from Helsinki to Kolari.

  • Luke says:

    Nice Sunday reading Rob. I think recently the longest sleeper train service in Europe is Prague -Moscow (over 28 hours)…I spotted this train arriving at Prague last month and I was amazed, how packed it was.

    • Bagoly says:

      There is even Nice-Moscow, which in total is 48 hours.
      There are limited reasons why it makes sense if one is going from Nice to Moscow (E.g. fear of flying, transporting precious knives), but a lot of sense if you are going from say Genoa to Innsbruck, or Bohumin to Minsk.

  • Nick M says:

    I have fond memories of the Moscow – St Petersburg train with a couple of friends when we were 17… we slept well from what I can remember, but the £2/bottle vodka may have helped with that!

    • Genghis says:

      So is interrailing no longer a right of passage for late teenagers?

      • Sandra says:

        Son & girlfriend had a great time interrailing last summer before going to uni. He is still telling me now how good European trains are compared to the U.K. They got the sleeper train from Venice to Vienna on their way to Budapest & said it was great – although partly subsidised by ‘the bank of …’ & used to upmarket hotels on family travels they paid extra for a 2 berth cabin rather than share with unknown others!

        • Genghis says:

          I still remember sleeping rough at Villach Hbf for quite a few hours while changing trains in the middle of the night from Slovenia to Venice. Good times…

        • JamesB says:

          Sleeping in stations was fine for me, my problem was sleeping on trains and waking up in the wrong place.

  • Anna says:

    OT as no bits – I mentioned this last night but not many people would have seen it. There was a post on Facebook yesterday by a BA passenger who said that during OLCI for his Lon-Toronto flight he found that his party of 3 in PE had been split up and the system told him he had to pay £40 pp to change the seat allocation. At LHR he was told this is a new BA policy. I may have missed something but given that Ryanair have been slated in recent months for doing just this, I’m amazed BA have managed to keep it so quiet!

    • AndyW says:

      This is not how the terms read to me on the website.

      Unless you have booked a Basic ticket (economy, hand baggage only), you can reserve your seat for free when check-in opens (24 hours before departure).

      With a Basic ticket (economy, hand baggage only), you can either

      pay to reserve your seat from the moment you book until check-in opens, or
      we’ll allocate you a seat for free when check-in opens. You can then pay to change to a different seat, although your choice may be limited.

      • Genghis says:

        Do WTP basic tickets now exist?

        • Anna says:

          I didn’t think there was any “basic” tickets in BA long-haul – yet!

      • Anna says:

        I know, but the gentleman on FB said this happened to him during OLCI yesterday. Is anyone flying in the next couple of days who can confirm whether his experience was some sort of system glitch?

        • AndyW says:

          Flying back from NY on Sunday, but in club. Haven’t booked seats so will see and report back

        • Anna says:

          Another FB user now posted the same has happened to him while checking in for a WT flight to Bangkok. Is no-one else concerned about this?! This would mean circa £80 pp to move a CW seat!

        • Bagoly says:

          Travelling as a couple, we were split up (E.g. B and J, or behind each other) on all four legs in Business (Promo) Class on QR last month TXL-DOH-BKK-DOH-TXL – I was surprised as I had not seen it mentioned it here (had I missed it?)
          For three legs we managed to get it changed at bag-drop, and on the fourth a fellow passenger took pity on us.
          Is this a penalty for booking the cheapest fares, and is there another way around it?

          • Rob says:

            Qatar lets you select seats on booking for free AFAIK. Do you mean they purposely moved you?

        • Lady London says:

          Wow. The Ryanairisation of British Airways continues….

          Is there no wheeze thought up by Michal O’Leary that Alex Cruz won’t copy?

        • Bagoly says:

          I didn’t notice an option to select seats on booking, but maybe I missed it.
          I did look using Manage Booking, after booking, but before check-in and could not see it there.

      • Nick says:

        It’s not a policy at all, and check-in desks will happily move people wherever they can to get them together.
        It’s an unintended consequence of ‘theoretical seating’ that blocks adjacent seats for DYKWIA-types. It’s worst in WTP as there are so few seats to play with overall. I’d have thought people on here would be jumping for joy at that policy, given how much they value ‘status benefits’, rather than whingeing about its consequences for ‘commoners’ 😉

        • Anna says:

          But surely it’s new for BA to be charging for seat selection during OLCI?

        • Rob says:

          Theoretical seating as a Gold is surprisingly powerful I’ve found. We moved our Stockholm return flight yesterday (48 hours before departure) and could still get two in Row 1 and two in Row 2.

  • Nick M says:

    Have I done something wrong? – I just did a search for Prague to Bratislava for 2 adults, 2 children and total price seems to be €50? (Admittedly searching on a phone)

    • callum says:

      That’s around the price I’d expect for a 4hr train journey in Eastern Europe. You’re booking seats though – not beds.

    • Luke says:

      Price is correct – it work around 15£ when booked online…just bear in mind, that trains may get overcrowded since slovakian students and pensioners get free travel on trains (Bratislava train station on my last year visit reminded me Clapham junction in the morning).

    • John says:

      Prague to Bratislava isn’t ideal for a night train, since it’s something like midnight to 5am.

      • Nick M says:

        Thanks all… agree, timings won’t really work for us but interesting to see the options…

  • Bagoly says:

    I wish this sort of approach could be expanded.
    LCC flights are fine if you are starting from a major hub like London or Frankfurt.
    But between second tier cities the network is less strong, E.g. We need to go from Warsaw to Dresden next month – an overnight train would have been really useful.

    • JamesB says:

      If you are interested in Asia sometime you might find Air Asia ASEAN surpass useful.

  • Andrew (@andrewseftel) says:

    That page talks about the old cards?

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