StockholmSubwaystoRy #35 – Extra: Silverpilen

Stockholm Subway with stoRy touRs

It’s Sunday again! That means it’s time for another entry in our Stockholm Subway StoRy! This time, we are not going to present to you a station from Stockholm, as we do every weekend. Instead, we are going to tell you a stoRy of a ghost train travelling through the Swedish capital’s subway system. How about that?!

The train we are talking about is called Silverpilen; the Silver Arrow, in English. This particular train is part of the city’s urban legends and, yet, maybe its stoRy could be still unknown to some locals!

Everything starts in the 1960s, when aluminum C5-model trains were introduced in the Stockholm Metro. This particular type of train kept its original silver color, even if all the other trains in the network were green at the time. The new trains did not have advertisements inside them either, having then strange-looking walls compared to the regular trains.

The C5 trains were often used during the rush hours and afterwords they went to the garage without passengers. The unique color, its image in the dark, its strange noises in the tunnel and the seldom use made it a subject of urban stoRies. This became a common theme by the 1980s. The silver trains were something different, out of the ordinary.

In total there were eight C5 models in use from 1966 to 1996. The silver train was mentioned in the book of Bengt af Klintberg, Råttan i pizza (1992). Also, it appeared in the Swedish film Sökarna in 1993, where it seem to have its own will. More, in 1997 it was the main subject of an episode of the television series Det spökar, dealing with ghosts stoRies.

The stoRies around the Silver Arrow implied that a person getting in the train would be gone for weeks or even years. Also, ghosts were believed to be common passengers in this unique train. Form time to time, missing people were considered to have been taken the silver train. Sometimes it was said that maybe they got off at Kymlinge Station – an abandoned station. Hence the saying: Only the dead get off at Kymlinge. But this is a stoRy for another day.

To follow our previous entries in Stockholm Subway stoRy, click here. And visit our blog every Sunday for a fresh entry from the Swedish underground!

Photo: Wikipedia.

Save

Save

Save

Save

Save