Stockholm 2018

Stockholm is where our cruise departed from, but rather than rush there just in time to get on the boat, we arrived a few days early too a longer look.

I had upgraded our tickets a notch on SAS in order to get free bag checking and a better choice of seats.  It was still pretty cheap.  Little did I know it also got us in the priority security line at the airport (which still took me three tries to get through...), admission to their lounge, and lunch on the plane. Nice!

The Arlanda airport is out in a rural area, but is connected by a 120 mph, non-stop train to downtown Stockholm. Since it was midday, we (okay, I) decided to the schlep to the Metro would be worth a try, rather than dialing up an Uber.

Arlanda Express at the airport station

Comfy seats

It actually worked pretty well.  We negotiated a maze of underground passages, purchased a transit ticked, negotiated the turnstile, and promptly boarded the Metro.

...the wrong way...which we didn't figure out until we reached the end of the line.

Stockholm Metro - new equipment

Older equipment - spotlessly clean

Worse yet, our AirBnB host we were to meet in the Metro station, had to leave.  So....she left the key with the convenience store clerk in the Metro station.  "I'm here for Sophia's key." worked just fine, but was the weirdest way to get an AirBnB key yet, narrowly edging out the key in the lockbox on the fence around a tree across the tree in Melbourne, Australia.

AirBnB key pickup location

The place itself was a bit funky.  Lots of Edison-style lighting and a Patti Smith themed decor, but it was in a nice area - Mariatorget (pronounced maria tory ya or something like that) on Sodermalm.  There were lots of sidewalk restaurants, cafes and bakeries as well as a park.

Mariatorget 

small park

crazy statue in small park

park lamps that look like lampshades

Funky, low hanging decor

on the street where we lived (for a few days)

Cool building facade

local church and graveyard

Having established home base, the next day we headed out for some sightseeing.

Day one.  Hit the travel information office and take a "free" walking tour.

Our tour guide

The tour gave a good overview of the city and told some interesting stories.  Where Greta Garbo got her start, where the "Stockholm syndrome" robbery occurred, the history of the Nobel prizes as well as how Sweden organized their society around a welfare state (not the public assistance sort of "welfare" the US has, but a set of services designed to foster families and parental care for children.  And IKEA. And, ABBA.  There is even an ABBA museum.  No IKEA museum...yet.

Saint Jacobs Kyrka

Parliament

Opera House (every city has an opera house...)

Share the road.  Bikes, pedestrians, cars and trams.  It's how they roll in Stockholm.

Grand Hotel (nice bathrooms!)

Palace guards retiring

Shopping mall

More shopping mall

Following the walking tour, we took a boat tour.  Stockholm is composed of many peninsulas and islands sheltered from the Baltic Sea by an archipelago.  The boat tour gave us a view of the city form the water.

tour boat

Gamla Stan (old city)

Riddarholmen Church

City Hall (more later!)

Heading out to circumnavigate Sodermalm

South shore of Sodermalm.  Used to be "the wrong side of the tracks".  Now trendy place to live.

Funky paint job on shipyard crane

One of many ferries serving Stockholm.  This one goes to the amusement park and museum area

Passing Stockholm Kastellet

Toward the end of the day, we walked over to Skinnarviksberget for the view.

Overlooking Gamla Stan

 We enjoyed the walking tour so much the first day, we took another one on the second day.  This one of Gamla Stan - literally, "old city."

Our tour guide

The Swedish "White House".  

Storkyrkan - contains1535 image of Stockholm

Link to the painting: Vädersolstavlan

Gamla Stan street scene

You can tell a building's age by the wall anchor design

The smallest statue

St. George and the dragon.  The dragon always loses.  In this instance, George represents Sweden and the dragon, Denmark.

Stortorget - the square in Gamla Stan

Backdrop for an old ABBA cover....

Viking rune stones used in construction over the ages

Old German church.  The German Hanseatic League ran much of the commerce for centuries, hence a German church in Stockholm.

Protestant churches have roosters on top.

German church

Another street scene in Gamla Stan

Cafe in Gamla Stan

A nice place for happy hour.

When in Sweden (or IKEA), meatballs!

An amazing museum.  A monument to bad engineering.  A fascinating story.  The Vasa Museum.  A poorly designed warship that was supposed to be the pride of the fleet.  First Swedish ship with two gun decks.  Launched in 1628.  Sunk in harbor an hour later. Sunk in mud.  Was raised nearly intact in the 1960s.  What you see is the actual ship. Turns out the ship was top heavy and too narrow.

Time for lunch.  This place was recommended by at least two locals.  The Blue Door.  The door isn't blue.  It was a long time ago.  Current historic building regulations keep the door from being blue again.  Only thing blue was the name and the neon sign.

Some Stockholm sights...

King Gustaf with sea gull on his head 

Royal Palace

Palace guard

Royal carriage (one of many on display in the palace)

Guard

Changing of the guard.  I have no doubt that all of these royal changing of  the guards were Monty Python's "Ministry of Silly Walks"

We also took an afternoon day trip to Uppsala

Stockholm Central Station

Regional train to Uppsala

 So, riding trains in Sweden isn't too difficult, but you do have to know the difference between the commuter and regional trains and that they don't cross honor tickets.  This makes sense as the regional trains make limited stops and run faster. It isn't terribly obvious to the newbie which is which and which platform has which train.

So, we goofed and boarded the regional train with our local ticket.  The good news is we didn't get tossed at the first stop.  Instead the conductor suggested we buy the right ticket online - which we did - but he never cared to check.  It was good practice for the return trip.

Double deck, 110 mph regional train.

Uppsala train station

Uppsala Cathedral.  Now Lutheran.  Once Catholic.  Started in 13th Century. 

Chapel next door...

 The Cathedral interior.

After the Cathedral, we wandered up to the fort. 

Looking back toward the Cathedral

Socially conscious art display at the fort

A more fort like posture...

 Then back into town for dinner

Street scene

Canal scene

It was election season while we were there.  Poster and tents and pamphlets from 9 different parties.

The Cathedral dominates the town

The following day, we headed down to the City Hall for a tour.  The City hall is a relatively new building - early 20th Century.

The Romanesque main hall

The Viking inspired ceiling in the legislative chamber

The  gold and glass mosaic tile ballroom

Our tour guide doing the explaining

some mosaic tile detail

A gothic style hallway

We spent our last day taking in the History Museum.  They covered the whole history of Sweden from after the last ice age to present.

Model of Viking village

Finally, it was time to board the ship.

At the pier in Stockholm

The view from the ship

Grona Lund amusement park

Heading out of town

Pleasure boats heading back after a nice day in the archipelago 

Sailing through the archipelago.  Reminded us of the Maine coastline.  Red and white buildings are a Swedish tradition.

Sea life

Cheers!

Thanks, Mr. Harbor Pilot

Seafood buffet on the fantail.

On to Helsinki

Good night!

Next stop, Helsinki.

Amsterdam 2018

 Travelling is a good thing.  I just read over 50 quotes about travel.  The consensus is: "Go.  It's good for you."

So, we went.

This time, our travel centered around a 14 day Viking cruise around the Baltic Sea and on to Norway that they call their "homelands" cruise.  We extended each end of the trip a bit adding in Amsterdam and Stockholm at the start and Scotland and England at the end.

First stop, Amsterdam.  We've been there before, but flying Delta direct from Atlanta and then on to Stockholm on a separate ticket the next day was SO much cheaper than flying the whole way one ticket that we decided to stay over in Amsterdam.

We arrived at Schiphol, shuttled over to the hotel near the airport, dropped out bags and grabbed a train to Centraal Station.  We walked over to Dam Square and grabbed a "free" walking tour - the tour is free but you tip the tour guide what you think it's worth at the end.  These types of tours are generally excellent and this one was no exception.

The tour looped around over the canals, through the red light district, past the Oude Kirk (old church), Nieumarkt (new market) and then over to the Jordaan near the Anne Frank House.

Royal Palace on Dam Square (used to be Dam on Amstel River here.)

Royal Palace

Oude Kirk.  Oldest building in Amsterdam.  You can see centuries worth of construction in this photo.

Original University

Before street names and numbers, this was how you identified your house.

Westenkirk in the Jordaan

Bikes and canals.  Amsterdam has lots of both.

Blomenmarkt - floating flower market.  Need any tulip bulbs? 

Obligatory stroopwafel.

We spent the rest of out day wandering over to the floating flower market and then strolling back toward Centraal Station and called it a day.

How can a place with four kinds of chocolate to add on your breakfast be bad?

Off to Schiphol airport and Sweden

Next up:  Stockholm

Railroad Renaissance or Dead Man Walking

There's a lot you can find out by just looking.  The problem is knowing where to look.

A recent thread on a Trains magazine got me thinking.  Conventional wisdom says that railroads are back.  That they're having a renaissance.  But, one fellow there says "not so fast", and he trotted out some data to show it.

Hmmm.

He had two data points about a decade apart.  I wondered what the rest of the data set looked like, so I dug into it.  I particularly wanted to know about NS - for obvious reasons.

Step one.  Get the data.  Edgar has it as NS published annual carloads and revenue by line of business in the 10-K.  Great!  Just copy and paste it into Excel, no sweat.

Actually, some sweat.  From year to year, NS arrayed the data differently.  In the older reports, they covered 5 years.  Lately, 3 years.  So, I grabbed and pulled and copy and pasted and "paste special, transposed" and "find and replaced" and cntl-c, cntl-v'd my way to 133 rows of data covering 1999 through 2017 by year.

Some basic results:

Well, okay.  Doesn't seem awful.  Coal is dying.  We already know that.  Intermodal is zooming.  We know that, too.  But Merchandise traffic seems sick.

• Every line takes a dip in 2009 for the recession.  
• Coal dives after 2011.  
• Merchandise never gets back to pre-2007 level.
• Intermodal is off to the races.

What about revenue?

This is better! 

• Merchandise revenue is growing nicely
• Intermodal growing, too, passing coal in 2014.
• Only coal is falling apart.

Here's the skinny on rates:

It's RPU that's driving the Merchandise revenue.  Look at the inflection point about 2004, when the "Thoroughbred Operating Plan" took hold - NS's version of scheduled railroading.

Also, look at how flat the RPU for Intermodal is.  Clearly, it's volume that's driving the revenue.

I'm going to add one more set of charts.  A set that might indicate the overall direction of NS.  I normalized the data with two factors.  One is GDP.  As the economy grows, one would expect rail traffic to grow proportionally.  The other is inflation.  It's always good to put money inconstant dollars so you don't mistake inflation for growth.  Here's what unit and revenue look like normalized for these factors.

If the lines are flat, then business is keeping up with the economy - growing just as fast.  If the line is going down, then the business isn't keeping up.  If the line is going up, then the business is growing faster than the economy.

Parsing this out.  Merchandise seems to by dying.  Plain and simple, although it seems to have plateaued the last five year or so, it hasn't come close to the pre-recession levels.

Intemodal is growing.  Maybe.  The overall trend is up, but the past four years are flat.  This likely means that conditions aren't great for truckload conversions.  Lack of investment in new, speedier lanes, perhaps?  There are lots of trucks on I-85 and I-81 that aren't being "converted".

Coal is just plain dead and I wouldn't plan on any resurrection.

(Note that I put Merch units on the RH y axis so it was easier to compare)

If you put it all together and look revenue, it's even worse.  Merchandise isn't taking in any more money than it did 20 years ago.  Intermodal, despite the volume growth, isn't growing revenue faster than the economy.  It doesn't look like it's going to be a replacement for coal, unless the company makes some investment for a cost and speed competitive Crescent Corridor or pulls a rabbit from their hat.

And, coal.  It's just dead.  It's okay to ride it to a stop, but if it keeps declining at the current rate since 2011, it'll be all gone in 25 years.

So, is NS in a stalled renaissance?  A flat-line existence where staying in business means finding cost efficiencies every year? Or, just having a long, protracted "going out of business" sale.

Don't listen to what they say.  Look at the data!  And, look where they spend their profits.  Hint:  It's not the Crescent Corridor.

These charts make me sad.

P.S. The only factor I didn't normalize for is revenue tons per car.  If car capacity is growing, that could bend some of these lines up a bit.  I believe it is, but I'm skeptical of the leverage...and I'm too lazy to dig out the data.