How each operator and line came to be from Meiji-era origins to today
The Skyliner pulls out of Keisei Ueno on the hour and the half hour, and somewhere between Aoto and Higashi-Matsudo it crosses 130 km/h, then 140, and on the cleanest stretches between Inba-Nihon-Idai and the airport it touches 160. That last figure is the fastest a train runs anywhere in Japan outside the Shinkansen, and…
The story I keep coming back to with Keikyu is the one about the night of 31 March 1933 and the third rail at Takanawa. By the early 1930s, the company that had begun life as the Daishi Electric Tramway had a problem most railways would have envied. It ran the only direct interurban between…
I once watched a man at the Otemachi transfer between the Tokyo Metro Marunouchi Line and the Toei Mita Line tap his Pasmo against the orange gate, walk forty metres, then tap it against a blue gate, and stop dead. He turned to his wife and said, in Japanese, “we just paid two companies.” She…
On the morning of 24 February 1898, around four hundred drivers, firemen and yard staff at Nippon Tetsudo’s Fukushima depot walked out. The line they ran, Ueno to Aomori via Sendai, was the longest railway in Japan and the spine of the eastern half of the country. For four days nothing moved on it. Trains…
The story I keep coming back to with Tokyu is the one about the empty trains. Goto Keita took over the Meguro-Kamata Electric Railway as managing director on 2 October 1922, six months before the line opened, with a clear problem on his desk. The track was finished. Den-en-chofu, the new English-style garden suburb the…
October 1986. The Tobu Railway closes its freight yards at Narihirabashi and Shimo-Itabashi. By the next morning the Chichibu Railway, sixty-odd kilometres up the line, has lost the connection that carried most of its cement onto the national network. The freight that paid 60-70 per cent of the railway’s bills through the 1970s is suddenly…
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…
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…
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…
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…
