 Hey everyone, welcome back to Transit Explained. In today's video we're going to be talking about Stockholm, a city which by many standards is fairly small, but that has an impressive metro system with 100 stations, and more being built. Furthermore, the design and character of the Stockholm Metro is very unique globally, making it an interesting example. Not just of how a small city can build a great metro, but an iconic one. As I said at the beginning of my Taipei video, I'll be doing a lot of explainers this year, so make sure to comment which city I should talk about next, and why, down below, before heading into the video. If you're not already, consider supporting me via Patreon or by joining my YouTube membership to help me explain the world's greatest transit networks, and to create better videos. Now before I get started, I have to thank Mons for his fantastic footage of Stockholm, which has been super helpful in making this video, as well as Marcus from Stockholm Sjarta, who has an awesome channel all about the urban nature and transit of Stockholm that all has English subtitles, so go check out both their channels because they are really awesome. Since I haven't talked about Stockholm much on the channel, we should start today's video by getting roughly acquainted. The city has an urban population of about 1.5 million, and a metro area population of 2.5, similar in size to Vancouver or Kyoto. As you can probably see, Stockholm has crazy geography, with the city spread over numerous islands, with rocky outcroppings all over the place. This is the city center, and this is the central station. The existing Stockholm metro network consists of three lines, and is incredibly radial, and branched, almost like a commuter rail network. The system is sometimes referred to as the T-Bonna or Tunnelbonna, which means tunnel rail in Swedish, where Bonna is similar to Bonn in German. The first line on the system to open was the Green Line in 1950. Plans of tunnel later used on the metro had been constructed as early as the 1930s, but it wasn't until the 1940s that plans for a metro solidified, and various sections of track, tunnels, and bridges, many of which were used in the interim for trams, came together to form the Green Line, which now runs from the far west of the city to three southeastern branches. The Green Line has 49 stations over greater than 40 kilometers of track, and almost all of it is above ground, except for the section through the city center, and a few other select locations. The system's second line first opened in 1964, roughly 15 years later in the form of the Red Line, which also had some portions converted from tram use. This line served the city's north with two branches, and the city's southwest with two, and ran through the same three central stations as the Green Line. As it turns out, the way these stations were arranged meant that a Gammae Estan, or Slussen, cross-platform transfers are available for services headed in the same direction, while at T-Centralen, the direction-changing transfers are available by stacking each line vertically. Here in Gammae Estan, or Old Town, we have one southbound platform for the Green and the Red lines, so you can change using the same platform, and we have one northbound platform also for changes between the Green and the Red. And when we move one station north to T-Centralen, the situation is reversed. Basically, the Green line going north means the Red line going south. In this way, disabled people, all the people who do not want to go downstairs, change platform. They can stay on the same platform using one of these stations to do their independence. The Red line also has over 40 kilometers of track, with 36 stations for a much wider average station spacing. And while it does have above-ground portions, particularly to the south, far more of the line is in tunnels, while the branch to the far south-west serves numerous high-density housing estates. The final line on the Metro, the Blue line, opened a decade later in 1975, and served the northwestern section of Stockholm, which has numerous high-density housing estates and Newtown-type developments, with two distinct branches, while the line also cuts across the core of Stockholm east-west perpendicular to the Red and Green lines. The Blue line is the shortest line at around 25 kilometers in length, with 20 stations, and is also the most heavily tunneled, with the only substantial above-ground section being the main elevated section of the Metro through Kista, a science and technology research and development district. Now, while the Metro is highly radial, Stockholm does have a bit of a trick of its sleeve in the form of the Tevarbongan, an express tram line which opened in 2000, which runs in an arc providing circumferential service to the western portion of the city, and between various Metro and suburban rail stations. Most of the line is in a dedicated off-street right-of-way, which allows some relatively high speeds, including on some shared railway right-of-ways. The improved connectivity provided by the line has made it massively successful, and it has been expanded to more and more locations every few years. This is a good way to do light rail. At the same time, the Tevarbongan cannot fix the issues which are inherent to the Metro network, such as its highly unbalanced nature, which limits the ability to provide as much service as might be attractive on the branches, as well as having the Blue line terminates so close to the center where frequency demands will be the highest. Fortunately, Stockholm has a number of projects which come together to fix a lot of the potential issues with the system, and these projects have been noted by researchers such as Alon Levy for their reasonable costs. The first planned expansion is an extension of the Blue Line branch, which travels to Kista two stops to the northwest, which should open in 2026. Following this comes the most dramatic change. The Blue Line will be extended south and east from its current terminus near the center of Stockholm to NACA, with several intermediate stations at the same time, including an elevator access-only station, Sofia, which will be the second deepest in the world. The Blue Line will be branched with a new branch traveling southwest instead of east to connect to the upstream junction point of the Green Line, where new platforms will be constructed underground, allowing this branch to be taken over by the Blue Line. This will enable the Blue Line to have two branches on each side, allowing for more balanced service with high frequencies on the branches, and it's planned to open in 2030. The next major expansion to be seen on the network is a new branch from the Green Line, which heads north through several rapidly developing districts, notably the one around the Major Friends Arena, which also has a massive mall on site. This new branch is coming along with this somewhat odd additional colored service, this time in the form of a yellow line, which will complement the Green Line. Both lines will serve the southern branches, while each line will serve one of the northern branches. This leaves the Green Line nicely balanced with two branches on both sides. This should be completed in 2028. The final new expansion project is the beginning of a new circumferential line, which would be similar to the core section of the Tivar Bonin and is currently colored gray. This would connect from the western interchange between the green and blue lines, south to the junction between the two southern red line branches and then beyond. The completion date for the project isn't clear yet. The Tivar Bonin also has expansion plans. The system has already been recently extended north to Brahma Airport with a branch, and this branch is being extended further up to Kista and beyond. This will create substantial new connectivity at that node. Now, the trains that actually provide service on Stockholm's metro network are really something special, so let's talk about them. Like other systems in Europe, such as Berlin, Stockholm has some fairly old rolling stock in service, including the C6 introduced in the early 1970s, the C14 from the late 1980s, and the C15. All manufactured by Swedish car builder ASEA, as well as some other companies, as with some of Sweden's high-speed rolling stock, which I talked about in my Swedish high-speed rail explainer. All of these car types are fairly traditional and are 17.5 meters long by 2.8 meters wide with 3 doors per side, and would be composed into 8 car trains of around 140 meters long with transverse interior seating. Like Stockholm's other metro trains, they run on either 750 or 650 volt DC third rail and standard gauge tracks. Things got much more interesting with the C20 stock, which were built in the late 90s and early 2000s by Bombardier. These trains were slightly wider than the existing stock, but more notably came in interconnected triplets of 3 cars of 46.5 meters in length, which are composed into longer 9 car trains. Unlike the earlier stock, the seating design of these trains is blended with some longitudinal seating added in for additional capacity. What's perhaps interesting are some of the unique features seen on the C20. For one, the refurbished trains in the series feature nice digital wayfinding, but they also have corrugated side paneling akin to trains like the X2000, though one unique train was produced using composite materials, which also featured air conditioning, something which the standard C20s do not have. Perhaps the most unusual feature of the C20 is the bogie layout, which places two under the central car, as with any metro car, but only one under the ends of the other two cars, with their inner ends supported by the center car. At the same time, the center car features three doors while the end cars each feature two. More recently, the C30 series of trains, also manufactured by Bombardier, are currently being delivered, as early trains are being phased out and the network is expanding. These trains take a more conventional design direction than the C20 model, with interconnected sets of four cars paired up into eight-car trains, and with each car featuring standard bogies and three doors per side. The C30's interior is not too dissimilar from the refurbished C20 with a mixed seating layout, and more modern lighting sensibilities that remind me of Montreal's Azure trains. Now, of course, given the Tivar Bonin is a tram line, it uses completely different stock, consisting of two tram models. The first is the 2.65 meter wide, 29 meter long, Flexity Swift Trams, which are somewhat unusual in featuring just three segments, somewhat similar to the Siemens S700. In addition, some of these trams are actually previously used on a line in the Netherlands. The second model of tram on the system is the 30 meter long CAF herbose, which uses a similar layout to the Flexities with three segments as well. Both models of tram are low floor, can be paired up into sets of two, and operate with a 750 volt DC overhead power line. Now, while the Metro and Tivar Bonin have interesting network design and rolling stock, Stockholm's system has a lot of other interesting features. For one, each service on the system to different branches is given a numeric designation. This, along with the highly radial and branched nature, makes the system remind me somewhat of an S-bon, especially since frequencies on the outer branches can be somewhat low by metro standards off peak, something which should be fixed with the network rebalancing and signal modernization. At the same time, while the system shares some elements in common with networks in Germany, one feature that it has that German systems do not is fairgates at stations. One interesting element of the Stockholm Metro, which is shared by other systems, such as Boston and Vancouver, is the T-Logo which designates stations standing for Tunnelbanah. Ems and news are probably still the majority worldwide, so I find this interesting. One of the most famous portions of the system in Stockholm are the cave stations, blasted and boarded straight out of the hard bedrock left mostly raw, and juxtaposed with smooth straight lines of the man-made infrastructure. This is taken even further with art features such as painting the rock at many stations. Cave-like stations like these are what most people associate with the Stockholm Metro, and it's also synonymous to how we build stations in the 70s, primarily on the blue line. But this technique is still around. We're currently adding 70 new stations to the Stockholm Metro, and they will all be using the same technique. These stations are built around 30-40 meters down into the bedrock, new ones even as deep as 100 meters below surface. And why this technique is so useful is that we have the Stockholm is situated basically on a granite bedrock. So what we do is we just blast those caverns into the bedrock. We reinforce the bedrock using basically thick rebards going in drilled into the mountain to make it a little bit more flexible and withstand vibrations. We then apply a membrane for rainwater before we spray painting with with this concrete, coarse concrete making it giving it this soft feeling. And then we'll let the artists finish the work by adding colors and uniqueness to all of the stations. This one particularly popular with Instagrammers. Influences from this could be a really cool thing to see in other cities with favorable geology such as New York and Montreal, where it will be featured to some extent on the brim. The Stockholm Metro is also very interesting because it punches way above its weight. In a city the size of Vancouver, Stockholm has nearly doubled the stations on its metro, and serves them with substantially higher capacity trains. This is even more impressive when you consider the incredibly challenging geography of the city, with numerous islands, lakes, waterways, and hills throughout the urban area. That also served to funnel riders onto public transit, but make construction incredibly difficult. This is probably part of why so much of the system is tunneled these days, because in Stockholm's case, underground might actually be simpler than above ground. With that considered, it may not be a surprise that more than half of the system's stations are above ground, despite the system's name which alludes to its tunneled nature. That said, new stations will all be underground, with no above ground stations having been built for decades. Tunnelling through Stockholm's bedrock has become quite efficient, and it actually means simpler construction in many ways, thanks to the less transitions between different types of operations, not having to go over and under so many different waterways, for example. The Tibana also has one of the best ghost stations I've ever seen, Kimlinga on the Blue Line, with an unfinished platform near a tunnel port in the center of a stand of trees. Finally, the system has quite the international connection to another system I frequently discuss, the Hong Kong MTR, in that the Tibana, like some mainline trains in Sweden, is actually operated by them. And so with that, we have the Stockholm Metro. Let me know what you think in the comments down below, and as always, thanks for watching!