Dispatches from a Cargo Cultist

[Aggie]

Good to hear from you again, Lindorm.

And the wild ride sometimes takes you to exciting places like Ånge, a railway junction town in the north, pop. 2872, and a goods yard bigger than the rest of the town and not much else. Oh, there's a sporting goods store that sells their own brand of camouflage hunter's clothing, and a combined pizza/thai/kebab joint. And a hotel that lies next to the marshalling yard and is full of railway staff lodging away from home. The town closes when the moose hunting season officially begins.

But that's about it. There are no tumbleweeds in Sweden, but they would certainly not be out of place together with a few twangs on a steel guitar on Ånge Main Street a late and windy evening.

In most prairie towns that meet that sort of description (pop. 2872 is quite large, actually), the main street is generally named as Railway Ave. and has a grain elevator alongside the tracks.  Trains are a big deal for grain-farming towns.

[Sibling DavidH]

Hoorah, Lindorm's back.  A lot of interesting news there, Lindorm.  Congratulations on the new qualification.

[Bob in a quantum-state-of-faith]

[Lindorm]

So, I made it back from Ånge in one piece.

That was a strange, yet comforting, little town. The railway yard and facilities are literally bigger than the rest of the town -look it up for yourselves on a map service! While Ånge is small, it does have a bit of everything. Actually, in more than one sense, One of everything.

One hotel, where the staff actually asked if you really, really, needed to have your room cleaned every day -but on the other hand were happy to let you in to their offices on your own to use the printer and phhotocopier. Oh, and the lunch buffet went out on the steam tables at 09:30, sharp. Dinner buffet was the lunch buffet, but 10 kronor more expensive.

One small bookshop that actually hade a quite nice selection of books, and not just DIY, cookbooks and crime stories, but also a lot of poetry and drama from regional authors, quite a bit of it self-published, a nice selection of Swedish literary classics -better than I have sen in quite a few Stockholm bookshops, and above all, a pair of owners who really loved books and their work.

One terrible, terrible Thai restaurant, where the thai fare consisted of such delicacies as tinned pineapple chunks and grated cabbage in some sort of pierogi dough, all with a dusting of common supermarket curry powder.

One very nice and old-fashioned clothes store, with staff that were genuinely nice, and managed to get a certain coat ordered for me and delivered to the store before I had to go back home. I did end up spending quite a bit of money there, but I did get some very nice autumn clothes there, too.

And, above all, the silence. Not a lot was moving in Ånge, and peopel are genereally rather quiet up there, anyway, so the week was one of autumn stillness and tranquility, with some sounds from the railway yard carrying over to the hotel in the cold and crisp autumn air.

It's also very much a railway town -at the hotel lunch buffet, you could see staff from a cross-section of the Swedish railway industry happily munching away. Certainly makes for some very good lines of communication and a generally relaxed attitude.

The trainees were a mixed bunch of people working for a track maintenance company. They were all about to be trained as drivers of on-track plant, and my task was to teach them a bit of technical stuff about goods wagons, techniques for loading and securing loads as well as an introduction to dangerous goods ("if the leaking tanker carries orange warning plates, RUN"). Some where more motivated than others, some were perhaps a tad young, but on the whole a nice bunch. Of course, they weren't glued to every word I said all the time, but sometimes you got one of those comments or questions that showed that someone had really been Thinking Things Over -a little victory in a way, I suppose. 

Now I am back in Stockholm, working on the driver training course and then heading off to Kiruna, north of the arctic circle, to do more trackworker training for the same company as in Ånge. And who knows what comes next?

...Oh, and that big corporate customer I mentioned in my previous post? They actually called me up today and said that they had realized that it was a bit awkward having to operate a project withour anything resembling a timetable. So they promised they would hash out a few things, and get back to me with a confirmed timetable by the end of the week.

a) I'll believe it when I see it, and then I'll expect the adjustments and revisions to start.
b) Jeez, you only promised a start of the project in march this year. A half-hearted promise of a timetable over half a year later? Surely, Sir is too generous and lenient!

[Opsa]

Sounds like you'll need to follow up on that, if they don't contact you again by week's end.

[Griffin NoName]

Ånge sounds lovely. I adore old department stores. I might want to move there, but I have no Swedish!

[pieces o nine]

I really enjoy reading updates in this thread, Lindorm; I've had friends in railroad towns here, so some things sound familiar. But quite a bit is foreign (in the interests sense, not the geographical sense, although I guess there is that, too) and provides an interesting window into another 'world'.

[Bluenose]

Ånge sounds lovely. I adore old department stores. I might want to move there, but I have no Swedish!

I agree, Ånge sounds like a delight.

On the old department store front, back in April when Mrs Blue and I went to Kangaroo Island, on our way home we stopped off for a few hours (and lunch) in the South Australian town of Tanunda.  There was an old fashioned department store in town that was fair dinkum fabulous.  Lots of good quality merchandise of every possible description and very reasonably priced, even more so as it is a country town, not one of our major cities.   Gotta love that! 

[Sibling DavidH]

It sounds like Leominster only with more excitements.  

[Pachyderm]

Gaffer tape! 

[Sibling DavidH]

Hello, Pachy!  Good to see you. 

[Opsa]

Elephant hug!

I like reading these, too. I like trains. I'm going on a train trip this weekend and can hardly wait. It's been a while.

[Lindorm]

Well, now I am probably the northernmost poster on the Monastery -way north of the polar circle, in the sub-arctic town of the arctic grouse, right next to the biggest subterranean iron ore mine in the world. Actually, some of the mine shafts are probably literally a kilometre underneath the bed I am lying upon at this moment.

This is a town that does have a strange feel to it -I´ll try to write something about it later in the week. Oh, and on wednesday, the forecast is of temperatures of -16 degrees and gusts of wind up to 33 m/s. Bracing.

[Swatopluk]

T is tolerable, v is not
My deepest mine crawling was only abot 800 m below ground (tourists were not allowed deeper).

[Opsa]

Brrrr! You can be our northernmost poster child!