Sweden: Gluten Free Train Travel

Regular readers of this blog will know that I’m quite a fan of train travel. It’s relaxing, easy and I can read, all of which are not the case when travelling by car.

In searching for a return flight from Stockholm using our BA frequent flyer miles, our only option on the day we wanted, was to fly back from Copenhagen. Perhaps some people would be deterred from going to Sweden in the first place. Not us! This meant we could get the train from Stockholm to Lund, a city in south west Sweden less than 30 minutes from Copenhagen airport. Lund is very close to Malmo but as we’ve already been to Malmo for a weekend, we wanted to travel somewhere new. The train journey from Stockholm to Lund was about 4 and a half hours of speeding along on a modern tilting train through snowy birch forests. Supremely relaxing.

Since we were leaving Stockholm in the late morning on New Year’s Day we booked a meal to eat on the train. I decided that since this option was available, I’d book it rather than taking my chances with the buffet car. As well as gluten free meals, SJ Swedish railways also offered other at seat dining options including dairy free and vegetarian meals.

This was my gluten free meal:

Special mention has to go to the gluten free bread:

And also this fantastic fruit salad:

Please note the at seat dining service is only available when travelling in 1st class on high speed trains. In the interests of research I did go for a wander down the dining car (not easy on the Swedish tilting high speed trains) and can report there were gluten free salads onboard. However, given the amazing availability of gluten free products in Swedish supermarkets, I would advise buying items from a supermarket to make your own picnic onboard. Click here for some ideas on where to shop in Stockholm.

The train tickets were amazingly easy to book. I booked them online while in London using the Swedish railway’s website (in English) and printing off the tickets at home. We presented this home-printed ticket onboard and the conductor scanned the bar code. Easy.

Booking the gluten free meal was slightly more tricky. Although I’d ordered and paid for the meal online at the same time as booking our tickets, the website didn’t allow me to select the gluten free special meal at the same time as booking the tickets. I noted the phone number given by the Swedish rail website to book special meals and called them the week before we travelled. If you didn’t want to call Sweden to organise this, you could either ask your hotel to call Swedish rail on your behalf or visit the Swedish rail office in the central station to arrange. They require 24 hours notice.