Kymlinge Ghost Station

The station

The blue line branch to Akalla opened in 1977, and Kymlinge was built on it for a new district on Järvafältet, which Aftonbladet reported in 2006 was meant to become the city's new office hub at the end of the 1960s. According to the landowner, Vasakronan, the plan depended on state agencies moving out of central Stockholm, and it collapsed when the government sent those agencies to other towns in Sweden instead. The municipality and the county council kept the longer tunnel route anyway and prepared for a station at Kymlinge. SL told the local paper Mitt i in 2023, "Because those plans were never realized, the station was never finished."

Region Stockholm's archive still holds the draft master plans for the area, with drawings, ground surveys, and planning documents for workplaces, housing, and recreation at Ursvik. The archive gives a different reason the building plans stopped: "a small fish," the rare stone loach that lives in the Igelbäcken stream, which is classed as a sensitive natural area.

What was built is a platform with working track and no escalators or signs. SL says the station costs it only operation, maintenance, and "a little electricity for lighting." Guards patrol it, and doors onto the platform have been forced. "It could be someone who wants to sleep, or someone curious," a technician, Teddy Lindqvist, told Mitt i.

Silverpilen

In 1959, Stockholm ordered a new type of silver-colored car from Hägglunds. One eight-car train was delivered in 1965, no more were ordered, and it ran as the only silver train on the network. It became known as Silverpilen, the Silver Arrow. SL told Mitt i that the cars ran from the mid-1960s until 1996, that seven were scrapped, and that the eighth went to Mannaminne, a museum in Nordingrå.

On February 6, 2006, Aftonbladet printed the saying from SL's Björn Dalborg: "According to the legend, only the dead get off the train at Kymlinge." The same article dated the stories to 1975, when it said SL began test-running Silverpilen, a decade after the archive has the train delivered. The folklorist Bengt af Klintberg described the train for the paper: "You knew it by its passengers' blank, dead stare. Whoever got on never got off."

Af Klintberg's 1986 collection of modern legends, "Råttan i pizzan," includes Silverpilen, according to the regional archive. Another folklorist, Tommy Kuusela, told Mitt i in 2023 that the book mentions no ghost station and that the Kymlinge part probably came later. No printing of the Kymlinge half earlier than the 2006 Aftonbladet article turned up. In 2022, SL released "Spårlöst," a fictional audio story about a train driver who disappears, timed to end as the listener gets off at Kista.

Kuusela has his own memory of the train, from Bredäng in the 1980s, when he was five: "It was night, and a silver train went by, and it was empty."

SL's marketing director said in 2022 that the station is not open to the public and that being there is forbidden. The way to see it is from the train. On the blue line toward Akalla, after a long stretch of tunnel from Hallonbergen, the unlit platform passes just before the tracks come out onto a bridge above a green area. Trains run through in both directions without stopping.