‘The Railway Museum’

Yesterdays Post seems pretty maudlin reading by the light of today, so let’s look at something more positive, and furthermore actually on topic for this blog, namely a visit to ‘The Railway Museum’ in Tokyo. I wasn’t sure what to expect. Japan has a tendency to make this sort of thing rather kitsch, with lots [...]

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Hamamatsu-Fuji

Whatever reason people use the Hamamatsu Grand Hotel, they don’t come for the view: a dreary mess of houses, punctuated by high-rise buildings stretches into the distance. The occasional taxi prowls between buildings. Utility poles and plastic convenience store signs spike into the sky. Some of the biggest buildings are car parks.
Interesting ritual by the [...]

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Day 1: Ise-Hamamatsu

We leave Ise-shi, Beautiful Wife’s home town, at 1930, packed into a minivan with curtains and all mod cons except legroom. As we leave I realise I’ve lost my spare memory card and I hope it isn’t going to set the tone for the journey. Travelling at night in Japan proves pleasant enough, and a [...]

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On the road again.

There’s good news and bad news at the moment: The good news is that we’ve now got our Japan Rail Passes, so from today we have unlimited travel on Japan Railways for two weeks. I’ve also had some opportunities to travel about and get a feel for the local lines, take some pictures and I [...]

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Sardine Can

We’re working on reducing the crud our lifestyle pumps out into the environment: we use a car about twice a year, and in between we travel long distance by rail, and locally by bus or bike. We’re sourcing more food locally and trying to avoid things that require lots of transport, and we’re looking at [...]

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Success…

Gotcha… A trio of DD51’s showing three livery variations in Yokkaichi.
Yokkaichi is not a pretty place: it’s a port city where oil tankers offload, and seems to be largely composed of refineries. What it does have is a large yard where you are very likely to see DD51’s. I can see that this won’t make [...]

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The Takasaki Light Railway

In Takasaki we met with Matthew Foster his wife Hiromi-san and Rinka, his little girl. Matthew is the owner of the Takasaki Light Railway, the only 16mm gauge model railway in Japan. Matthew has used a heck of a lot of ingenuity in making the line as there are almost no parts or kits available [...]

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To the hills…

Nagano is in the mountains and is known for skiing, a sort of Japanese Zermatt, or what Zermatt would look like if the locals decided to build skyscrapers and a Shinkansen terminal in the middle. Between there and Nagoya is a lot of forest and lumpy bits, cut by rivers in deep gorges with spindly [...]

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More on the DD51 theme…

Nagoya region has lots of DD51’s. Unfortunately they were still being secretive last week, so all I got was the occasional glimpse: I saw two shoot past on a tank train and a red one was prowling behind wagons in Yokkaichi. Two more had taken cover under a bridge which made it impossible to photograph [...]

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The Elusive DD51

Tomorrow we head off to the hills to visit some of my wife’s relatives. We’re going by train, naturally, so expect a few more pictures. In my continued quest for modern narrow gauge I’m hoping to get some shots of the tilting diesel and electric MUs that run into the mountains. I travelled [...]

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