Snowdon summit

Earlier this month I was in North Wales for a week or so with the campervan, and among other things took the opportunity of a trip to the top of Snowdon. On the train - but it was a really hot day and I wasn't sure whether I could cope too well with walking down, or even up. The little narrow gauge train from Llanberis was £23 return as we didn't organise ourselves in time to get the half price tickets on the first train of the day, but money well spent if you didn't fancy a three hour walk up and about the same going down.

Naturally I took quite a few photographs but the mountain was so crowded it was hard to get anything really interesting. Time at the summit was limited because if you didn't take the return train (after a 30 minute stay) you had to take your chances of finding a seat on a later one.

The new visitor centre at the train terminus just below the summit is really well designed to blend in with the landscape and is a worthy addition. There's a blog covering its construction here, and this features some pretty goood pictures as well. See http://blog.snowdonia-active.com

Helsinki central railway station

It’s general practice in Finland to find all the signs in both Finnish and Swedish, both being official languages. The magnificent Helsinki Central railway station (rautatieasema in Finnish and järnvägsstation in Swedish) is a widely recognised landmark in central Helsinki and the focal point focal public transport in the Greater Helsinki area. The granite exterior is notable for the two pairs of statues holding spherical lamps, and its clock tower (the statues are featured, for instance, on the covers of local timetables published by the country’s national rail operator, VR).
The station’s interior, besides its beautiful high ceilinged booking halls and wide concourses, has a good range of shops, cafes and bars, and entrances to the underground shopping complexes linked with the Kamppi store and other key points in the commercial centre. From the central station the trains rush out to the north, past Töölönlahti Bay and quickly reaching Pasila and on though the suburbs of Helsinki

It’s also a great place for people watching, with commuters coming and going between the trains, the connecting buses, and the city centre itself. I took quite a few informal shops near the cafes and ticket offices. And what really interested me were some of the quirky things going on – like the display below, some kind of art school project, I think, and the notes stuck to a pillar (I couldn’t figure these out, maybe they were advertisements). There were stalls selling berries and other fruits. It's a very pleasant atmosphere, as main railway stations go.