Tokyo train operators and their lines: JR, Tokyo Metro, Toei, private railways
Shinagawa, platform 2, late afternoon. The destination board flips to “Airport Limited Express, Haneda Airport Terminal 1·2”, and you have ninety seconds to decide. The eight-car set rolling in is a 2100 series, painted Keikyu red with a white stripe, two doors per side, and rows of cross-seats facing forward. It is not the train…
16:42 at Narita Airport Terminal 1, downstairs at the Keisei platform. Two trains are advertised on the same departure board, four minutes apart, both signed for central Tokyo. The first is a Skyliner: eight aluminium cars, AE form, single doors, reserved seats only, ¥2,580 plus base fare, 36 minutes nonstop to Nippori at up to…
06:24 at Naka-Meguro on the Hibiya Line. The 13000 series eased onto the southbound platform, doors hissed once, and the platform staff waved a school party towards the wider doors near the back. I stepped aboard a near-empty four-door car bound for Kita-Senju, watched the LED panel above the door flick from Hibiya silver to…
06:42 at Yokosuka, on the platform for the Tokyo direction. The train arriving is an E217 series, fifteen cars of stainless steel and 1990s plastic, the white-and-blue livery scuffed at the corners and the destination indicators showing red LEDs against a black field. The train behind it, two minutes later on the next departure, is…
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…
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,…
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…
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…
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.
