Japan for Railfans & Trainspotters

About this book

Every railway keeps two journeys. The first is the famous one — the ride itself, documented line by line in every guide ever printed. The second is quieter, longer and almost unwritten: the day spent not on the train but with it — the ground claimed at a platform end before the peaks, the riverbank above a great bridge held from first light to last, the depot gate on the one morning when the fleet is worked in public, the small crossing where a kept steam locomotive passes twice a day. This book is a guide to that second journey: 200 complete railfan days across Japan, each composed around the same four questions. How is the ground claimed? What traffic does the day contain as the line lives its ordinary life in front of its guest? How is the day kept — logged, numbered, filed and handed over complete? And what does the ground ask of the watcher it hosts?

Japan answers the railfan's questions better than any country on earth. It runs a network of unmatched variety — bullet trains and one-car diesels, steam kept in working order, tram diamonds where five generations cross, freight arteries behind the passenger day — through scenery that offers a ground worth claiming at almost every mile, staffed by people whose pride in the working is itself half the spectacle. This guide designs two hundred of those days: terminal platform ends, lineside banks and fields, mountain benches above switchbacks and loops, shore grounds, depot and museum open days, steam and heritage grounds, city loops and freight corners, and the craft of composing such a day anywhere.

A word on honesty, because method here is a form of it. Trains are retimed; open days move; seasonal workings come and go. This guide asserts none of those changeable things: every entry closes by naming the official channel through which its day is to be confirmed. What the entries teach is the durable part — the shape of a well-composed watching day, the keeping discipline that turns standing at a fence into a possession, and the manners that keep the world's best watching grounds open to the guests who come after you.

Eight parts: great terminals and junctions · lineside rivers, bridges and fields · mountain and gorge grounds · coast and island grounds · depots, museums and preserved railways on their open days · steam, heritage and small railways · city networks of loops, trams and freight corners · and a closing craft part — 25 method days (the logbook opened properly, numbers read as evidence, passages timed without a timetable, sound kept as a record, open days decoded, the finished day filed and handed over) that teach you to compose a railfan's day anywhere.