Biography | Bo Jondal — Resident Engineer Where the Rock Tunnel Met the Cut

The photograph of 29 June 1933 does not show a finished metro. It shows four men at the join between rock and cut in Björns trädgård.

Bo Jondal stands third from the left.

Stockholmskällan captions him as the posthavande ingenjör, the resident engineer, on the Södertunneln works.

Beside him are S. Björkman, Gösta Lidén, who had run the design, and works manager Sibert Jägerdal.

Vem är det 1997 compresses the same job as posthavande ingenjör for the tunnelbana Slussen–Skanstull, 1932–33.

The city council had voted the tunnel on 30 March 1931.

Cost was put at 4.5 million kronor.

Work began in 1931 under Katarinaberget and in open cut along Götgatan.

The line was 1,370 metres, with stations at Slussen, Södra Bantorget and Ringvägen.

Those last two names are now Medborgarplatsen and Skanstull.

On 30 September 1933 the tunnel opened for trams.

Stockholm called it tunnelbanan before the steel-wheel metro existed.

Jondal was thirty-three.

The same city office later made him works chief of the full metro build, 1945 to 1951.

The first steel-wheel line, Slussen to Hökarängen, opened on 1 October 1950 on the alignment he had already helped put underground.

Björns trädgård is still a park on Götgatan, opposite Medborgarplatsen, at about 59.315 north, 18.074 east.

The western edge of the park was cut for the tunnel and later restored.

The visitor sees grass and a skate ramp, not the 1933 face of rock and concrete.

Photo: Stockholmskällan / Stockholms stadsarkiv, CC BY, engineers at Katarinatunneln, 29 June 1933