The last 8500 series to run in revenue service on the Den-en-toshi Line was set 8637F, on 25 January 2023. It pulled out of Nagatsuta with a headboard, a crowd, and forty-eight years of route maps in its travel-card readers. The 8500 had been Tokyu’s signature train since 1975: the boxy stainless-steel commuter set with…
The mountain that the trains are taking apart is called Mount Buko, and you can see it from every passenger window for the last twenty kilometres of the line. It used to be 1,336 metres tall. The 1900 survey said so. By 1977 it was 1,295 metres. The current official figure is 1,304 metres, but…
Twenty trolleybuses arrived in Tokyo in early 1952 with the wrong-side doors. They had been built for Tianjin, in northern China, where traffic drives on the right and bus passengers board from the kerb on the opposite side from a Japanese vehicle. The Korean War had broken out the summer before. Western governments, including the…
06:18 at Sengakuji on a Tuesday morning. The train pulling in from the south is a Keikyu 1000 series in red, eight cars, running fast off the Main Line. It does not stop in the way most trains stop. The driver swaps out, the front display blinks from “京急” to “浅草”, the route number changes,…
In May 1944, with the war already lost in everything but name, the wartime transport ministry was rolling up Tokyo’s private railways into a single state-managed conglomerate, and Tokutaro Inoue, the president of Keio Electric Tramway, was holding out. He held out longer than anyone else in Tokyo. When the order finally came down and…
22 February 2018, platform 1 of Shinjuku Station underground, 17:00 sharp. The first scheduled Keio Liner pulled out for Keio-Hachioji with a 5000 series II ten-car set, KH-39, and a small group of railfans on the platform photographing the departure board because Keio had not sold a seat on a commuter train for ninety years…
In 1905 the Tobu Railway Company was, by its own subsequent admission, a mess. The line ran 39.9 km from Kita-Senju up to Kuki and not much further. Twelve British steam locomotives ordered from Beyer, Peacock & Co. of Manchester were finally hauling freight and the occasional passenger, but the company had failed to extend…
06:18 at Asakusa. The Spacia X on platform 4 is a six-car all-aluminium Hitachi A-train painted in the off-white of the Yomeimon gate at Toshogu, with hexagonal end-car windows that pick up the kumiko woodworking pattern from the same shrine. It cost about ¥3,500 to ride to Nikko and a six-car set won the 2024…
Odakyu’s first proper limited express was tested at 145 km/h on a borrowed stretch of JNR’s Tokaido Main Line in September 1957, and the engineers who watched it run were not from Odakyu. They were from Japan National Railways, taking notes for a project they had not yet announced: the Tokaido Shinkansen. The little vermilion…
Three lines, 70 stations, 120.5 km of double- or quadruple-tracked rail running on 1,067 mm narrow gauge out of Shinjuku, with eight commuter series and three Romancecar limited expresses in active service. The complete guide to what runs on the Odakyu network in 2026.
