The first day in Tallinn was quite exciting. I saw most of the important sights, the old town and got a bit of basic orientation in the town.

My goal for the second day was to further explore the town and get some nice images. As you may already know I am very interested in public transport of cities. I think trams, trains, buses and other infrastructure have somthing photogenic to them. Furthermore I wanted to see where the Rail Baltica will be ending in the future, so I visited the Ülemiste station where the northern terminal of Rail Baltica will be built.

But more about that will follow in a separate blog post. In this post I will show you a bit how Tallinn looks off the beaten track.

St. Olafs Church

However before I went to the outer parts of the town I had a good breakfast in the old town and went up St. Olafs Church (Oleviste Kirik). There is a small entrance fee, I believe as a student is was something like 3 Euros, but it is definitely worth checking out. From the top of the church you have a great view over Tallinn. You can see the old town, downtown, the harbour as well as the districts to the northwest.

Suur Paala

After taking some photos from above I followed a more down to earth approach and travelled to the end station of one of the tram lines. Suur Paala is a very unspectacular loop along a 4 lane road in the east of the town.

The tram lines are not very long and end well within the city limits. After a short visit to Suur Paala I took the tram back to where the lines split up and walked over to Ülemiste station

Ülemiste

Ülemiste is planned to become the terminal station for Rail Baltica. However right now it is a two track stop for commuter trains only. There are not too many trains going and so I had to wait half an hour for the next ones to pass. I had to wait because I wanted to film one passing and take photos of another passing. I also tried filming using the GoPro. Unfortunately it had an SD card error and did not record anything the first timea and also didn’t work the second time. It was super annoying. Fortunately I still got my pictures and movies. Unfortunately it started to rain heavily and my jacket got soaked.

Sikupilli

On the way out I saw that there was a very cool street leading up to the junction at Ülemiste Station. So I decided to walk back instead of taking the tram and I have to admit this kind of stuff is definitely something I would build in Cities: Skylines. It just looks very cool how the street swerves around to make space for the tram stations. And the tram line through the grass also looks very interesting. Again I did not do as many photos as usual since I also took a lot of videos.

However after several hours around I was very wet and so I decided to head back to the AirBnB. On my way back there I took some photos of the district where the AirBnB was. I think it shows very good the contrast between old an new buildings that exists in Tallinn.

Balti Jaam

Later on I decided to go on a short walk to Balti Jaam which was within walking distance of my AirBnB. It is Tallinn’s main station, although for a main station there is very little traffic. Estonia as a whole only has about 1.3 million inhabitants and rail traffic is limited to local service, since there is no direct connection to other EU states. You would have to go via Brest in Belarus which would require a visa and so nobody really does that.

Again on the trains you can see that Estonia profits a lot from money from the European Union. This has the upside that Tallinn can afford a very modern public transport system.

At Balti Jaam there is also an old soviet steam engine on display. Unfortunately it is hard to find any info about it, because all markings have been removed except the number L-2317. However according to the internet the locomotive was built somewhere around 1953 or 1954 in Russia. (Source 1, Source 2)

Hobujaama

Finally I decided to take the tram to Hobujaama (at least I think that’s what it’s called) and take some pictures there. It is located in the very center of Tallinn and it is the station where all 4 tram lines meet. Despite being 80km south of Helsinki Tallinn is still pretty far north and thus it was still quite bright even at 8pm.

After this long day I was looking forward to the bed in my AirBnB which definitely had the most awesome bed linen ever! 😁