A historical discovery in Norway

Last summer I was on vacation in Norway and at a certain point I was noted on an old container. This container is now used as a shed for firewood, which isn’t very remarkable because this happens more often in Norway. Something that is remarkable, at least for me, is that this container turned out to be an old Sties container that used to be on a motorcar or trailer.

When I saw the container, I first thought it was a VKB container belonging to the old model. The container was completely repainted in white, but because this was done some time ago, the paint started to come off. When I came closer, I saw underneath a flaked piece a remnant of what appeared to be blue paint. Now things started to get interesting, as this type of blue paint seemed very familiar to me. I started looking for details on the container, and those were found too.

On the doors at the backside of the container, you could see the outline of some letters due to all the dirt that stuck to it. For most people some letters aren’t very interesting, but for me, in this specific case, it was. After some more exploration, and redrawing some of the found letters, it turned out to be a container from the early days of Sties, and specifically the days in which “Stie’s” was still written in the old style on the backside. There was also some more text on the left door: “Ses Grillets”. On the right door was some incomplete text (“Transportes” or something like that, see pictures below). Unfortunately, this text wasn’t completely readable anymore and, to me, it is a mystery what the text used to say. Maybe it could possibly have to do with the containers that, back in the days, were used on a Scania LB 76 that travelled by rail from Trondheim to Oslo. The container was from that period of time, so it could be that the text on the right door has to do something with the transport by rail?

If anyone knows more about this container, and specifically the text that could possibly have been on the right door, then I would be pleased to hear from you (you can leave a comment on this story below). It would be nice if we could help each other to unravel the mystery about the exact origin of this historical discovery, because if you take into consideration that this container is supposedly from the ‘60s, and therefore over 50 years old, we can definitely consider this to be a historical discovery.

Below you’ll find a couple of pictures from the container (in the last two pictures I filled the letters with red, so they are a bit easier to see):