Floby is a locality situated in

Falköping Municipality Falköping Municipality () is a municipalities of Sweden, municipality in Västra Götaland County in western Sweden. Its seat is located in the stad (Sweden), town of Falköping. The present municipality consists of more than 50 original local g ...

Västra Götaland County Västra Götaland County () is a county or '' län'' on the western coast of Sweden. The county is the second most populous of Sweden's counties and it comprises 49 municipalities (''kommuner''). Its population of 1,616,000 amounts to 17% of S ...

Sweden Sweden, formally the Kingdom of Sweden, is a Nordic countries, Nordic country located on the Scandinavian Peninsula in Northern Europe. It borders Norway to the west and north, and Finland to the east. At , Sweden is the largest Nordic count ...

. It had 1,499 inhabitants in 2010.

History

In 1858 the first portion of the railway line connecting

Stockholm Stockholm (; ) is the Capital city, capital and List of urban areas in Sweden by population, most populous city of Sweden, as well as the List of urban areas in the Nordic countries, largest urban area in the Nordic countries. Approximately ...

and

Gothenburg Gothenburg ( ; ) is the List of urban areas in Sweden by population, second-largest city in Sweden, after the capital Stockholm, and the fifth-largest in the Nordic countries. Situated by the Kattegat on the west coast of Sweden, it is the gub ...

was opened, and a railway station was opened in the parish of Floby, near the border of the neighboring parish of . The station was first called Sörby, but in 1912 the name was changed to Floby. A village with industries and services began to grow, and it had a status of municipality from 1923 to 1961. With the municipality reform of 1952, Floby became the administrative center of the Municipality of Vilske, which was amalgamated into

in 1974. After the railway station was shut down and the municipal functions were centralized in Falköping, Floby began to regress beginning in the middle of the 1970s, with reduced service and population. This backwards progress seems to have stopped in conjunction with the restoration of the train connection in 2003, when Floby became a stopping place for regional train lines. Floby's largest business is Volvo Personvagnar AB (Volvo Car Corporation) with 500 employees, which manufactures disc brakes, hub modules, and connecting rods for the vehicle industry, and Autokaross i Floby, Inc. (with 80 employees). Many people commute to these industries from other nearby locations, but many of Floby's inhabitants commute to other locations, most commonly to Falköping.

Notable people

* Johan Henrik Kellgren (1751–1795), a Swedish poet and critic.

References

Populated places in Falköping Municipality {{VästraGötaland-geo-stub