Train Travel in Wintry Finland

Finland isn’t the cheapest of destinations, even with the convenience of the Euro. Accommodation, activities and food costs can really eat up a lot of your Finnish travel budget. That’s why I found it a nice surprise to discover that train travel through this large nation is actually very reasonably priced, and that the modern trains and sensible timetables can make for a great way to see the Finland that lies beyond Helsinki.

I visited Finland in deep, dark winter: in fact, while I was staying just south of the Arctic Circle, the winter solstice occurred, and daylight hours were almost non-existent. My memories of Finland, then, are all covered in a twilight kind of haze: the sun never really came up, just bobbed around on the horizon for a bit before going down again. But don’t let that stop you heading to Finland in winter, because it’s actually a real atmosphere creator. And that’s why my first big train journey out of Helsinki began after a good sleep-in, but still in the half-dark.

In fact, I used the Number 51 train from Helsinki to Rovaniemi, a ten-hour daytime train which really showed me what Finland looks like. It was interesting enough to see the outskirts of Helsinki, a modern and clean city, but with more and more snow as we left the well-cleared city center. Out in the countryside, sometimes all I could see outside was a white desert, but often forests popped up out of the white – apparently almost three quarters of Finland is covered in forest. Sometimes a small village flashed by, with multi-colored high-pitched roofs breaking up the white. Inside the train was interesting too: a large number of young people were clacking away with knitting needles, creating scarves and socks, and food carts came up and down the aisles.

At major towns, our express train stopped for a couple of minutes, and I used my guidebook to learn the key facts about towns like Tampere, a major university town where dozens of student-aged Finns disembarked. My destination, Rovaniemi in Lapland, was just a few kilometres short of the Arctic Circle, and by the time we reached it in the early evening, it was night time black. At around 70 Euros, I’d not only been transported from one end of Finland to the other, I’d also seen much more of the country than I would from a plane and I’d got a good sense of the vastness and wintry whiteness of it all.