Vinnie and the Metro

The children’s book – Vinnie and the Metro

The children’s book Vinnie and the metro is an initiative of the Swedish Rock Engineering Association. The idea was to produce a children’s book so that children would get an insight into how exciting tunnels are.

In order to implement the idea of producing a children’s book, the Swedish Rock Engineering Association established a collaboration with a publisher. They were to design a book about tunnel building in one of their existing children’s book series. about Vinnie (Bojan in swedish) with author Johan Anderblad and illustrator Filippa Widlund. The Swedish Rock Engineering Association made sure that the tunnel related content was correct.

In the book, Vinnie’s mother tells about when she was with them when they built a metro tunnel. It is a detailed story that mixes facts and accurate illustrations with fairy tale. You get to follow step by step how a tunnel is built, everything from drilling and blasting to hauling away material and strengthening the rock.

As part of getting more young people to choose this as a profession in our industry, we invested in offering the book free of charge to all preschools in Sweden. The news about the new exciting book in the popular Vinnie series spread quickly and resulted in us sending out over 6,000 books to preschools around Sweden, Norway and Finland in May 2021. After that we have printed and published even more, in total we have printed 14,000 copies.

Today, the book is also available translated into English. The first children’s book in the Vinnie (Bojan) series to be translated into English. The children’s book is called ”Vinnie and the metro” in English. In dialogue with the publisher, we are now able to provide the book in pdf format in English to anyone who wants a copy.