Look for the bright red steel tram with its boxy vintage shape, wide rectangular windows, and the route display that reads “Pub - Kiertoajelu.”
Spårakoff is one of those ideas that ought to have been a throwaway joke and somehow became a beloved civic institution. In nineteen ninety-five, to celebrate Sinebrychoff’s one hundred and seventy-fifth anniversary, designers took a tram from nineteen fifty-nine - car number fifteen - and gave it a second life as a moving restaurant, renumbered one hundred and seventy-five. It was only meant to last for two years. Instead, it kept charming the city, and by twenty twenty-five it had reached thirty years on the rails.
There is something wonderfully Helsinki about that. A public tram, built for getting people from one place to another, turns into a place where getting nowhere quickly becomes the whole pleasure. Restaurant manager Sanna Lindholm once called it “a ship on rails”, and that is exactly right: a tiny voyage through the centre, with the city drifting by the windows like scenery on a stage.
The app images show the tram in its newly transformed form at Market Square in nineteen ninety-five, and the side view makes the joke beautifully clear: where a line number should be, it simply says “Pub - Kiertoajelu” - pub sightseeing.
Inside, the scale is deliciously compact: about twenty square metres, twenty-four seats, a bar counter, and even a tiny lavatory so small it had to be made in a factory that builds ship cabins. For a time, it was thought to be one of the few of its kind in the world. Yet for all its playfulness, it still depends on the same serious systems as every other tram in Helsinki; when changes to the electrical network threatened its future, Sinebrychoff paid for the overhaul so it could return.
If you want to ride another time, it generally runs from two until nine in the afternoon, Monday to Saturday, and rests on Sundays. From here, Fennia House is only about a minute away.
