Waking up in the wrong city is normally the prerogative only of bridegrooms-to-be after a stag party has gone slightly astray, but it proved to be a reality on Monday morning for around a dozen passengers on the overnight sleeper-train from Rovaniemi to Helsinki.
They opened their eyes to the sight of the suburbs of Turku, some 160 kilometres to the west, rather than the capital.
Some of the carriages on the Rovaniemi-Helsinki P266 overnight train are routinely re-routed in Tampere to the train leaving there at around 04:30 for Turku, but on Sunday night the carriages included one that did not belong: it should have been heading for Helsinki.
The staff on the Turku-bound train had only noticed the additional carriage after the train had travelled some distance towards its destination.
One or two of the dozen or so passengers in the wrong place at the right time jumped into taxis in order to get to where they needed to be, while others caught the next train to Helsinki, arriving three hours later than the 06:54 when the train was supposed to pull in. Herbert Mannerström from Finnish Railways (VR) said the matter was an extremely unusual and regrettable human error that had been the sum of a number of problems, starting with a computer glitch in the make-up of the train before it left Rovaniemi on Sunday evening.
The passengers are eligible to claim compensation for the delays and inconvenience caused.
The curious incident was first reported by the late-edition tabloid Iltalehti on its web pages.
