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Transport Photos from Budapest

Tue, 24 Feb 2026 04:30:00 GMT

I recently visited Budapest for a couple of days, mostly to take a gander at its public transport system.

Rather than go through my trip chronologically, like I did for my Japan trip, this time I'll go by mode of transport.

Trams

Budapest operates roughly five types of trams today:

the Ganz CSMG, a domestically-built articulated high-floor tram from the 1960s. Some trains were refurbished and are now called the KCSV-7, but I am not quite sure how to visually distinguish the two.

A KCSV-7 at Jászai Mari tér

Two CSMG units at Déak Ferenc tér

the Tatra T5C5, a high-floor tram from Czechoslovakia, built from 1978. These are the only non-articulated cars in service today. There are various modernized versions but I will not go into them here.

The Tatras operate in two- or three-car formations depending on the line. This photo was taken at Móricz Zsigmond körtér.

The TW 6000, articulated high-floor trams bought used from Hannover. They were originally built by Linke-Hoffmann-Busch and Duewag.

A TW 6000 at Közvágóhíd

For comparison, here's a TW 6000 in Hannover.

The Siemens Combino Supra, an articulated low-floor tram from the 2000s.

The Combino hardly needs an introduction due to its ubiquity (even Hiroshima bought some) and its legendary technical difficulties in the 2000s.

The CAF Urbos, an articulated low-floor tram from the 2010s that comes in two different lengths.

The short version at Örs vezér tere

The long version at Etele út / Fehérvári út

The Millenium Metro (M1)

Due to its age, the Millenium Metro stands out from the rest of the subway system. Built in 1896, it is one of the oldest metros in Europe¹.

During these early days, the concept of a metro or subway was not as codified as it was today, and as a result, many of the early systems are very interesting. Whereas the Metropolitan Railway in London saw itself as basically a mainline railway that happened to run in underground, with the main goal of connecting several of London's termini, Budapest's M1 feels more of an underground tram, running with short, narrow and low-capacity vehicles.

The line is currently operated with the Ganz MFAV, a derivative of the CSMG tram. However, the tunnel is very low because it had to fit between the road surface and a sewer, and regular tram vehicles simply do not fit into this tunnel. Even the earliest vehicles on this line were low-floor, which is absolutely necessary in order to have a passenger room of acceptable height. The driver, meanwhile, sits above the bogies in a very cramped high-floor section.

Because the traction systems cannot be installed below the floor or on the roof of the vehicle, they are instead concentrated in the articulated sections above the two central bogies. Unlike on the CSMG, passengers can not move between the three cars of the train.

For some reason, the MFAV always reminds me of this minecar from Bochum's mining museum.

If you visit Budapest, you can find a small museum dedicated to the M1 in a bit of disused tunnel at Déak Ferenc tér.

Other metro lines

There are three other metro lines. The M2 and M3 were built during the 1970s and began operation with Soviet-built rolling stock. The M4 was opened in 2014 and runs automatically.

The M3 still runs refurbished Metrowagonmash stock. The other two lines operate using relatively boring Alstom EMUs.

The rack railway

This is technically considered part of the tram system (as Line 60) and even has a rail connection to the tram network. Of course, as a rack railway, it has its own distinct rolling stock and as such stands out from the rest of the tram system.

As the cars are currently approaching their end-of life, the transit agency is apparently trying out the viability of converting the line to adhesion operation.

The Children's Railway

At Széchenyi-hegy, the upper terminus of the rack railway, a short walk will take you to the Children's Railway. This is a common sight in the former Eastern bloc. Those narrow-gauge railways, often in public parks, were built to introduce children to jobs in the railway industry, and most of those jobs are performed by children under adult supervision.

When I visited, the railway was just running a diesel engine with a single car once an hour, and the staff on board outnumbered the passengers. But apparently this line becomes fairly crowded in the summer.

Passenger car interior

The diesel locomotive was operated by an adult.

At each of the termini, the locomotive has to run around the train. This is Hűvösvölgy, the northern terminus. Instead of taking the train back, you can also use the tram from here to return directly to the city center.

Trolleybuses

An Ikarus trolleybus at Keleti station. This was the only one I saw in passenger service, unfortunately.

This one is used for staff training.

These days, the bulk of the trolleybus fleet consists of Solaris Trollinos, the trolleybus version of the Urbino.

HÉV suburban trains

MÁV-HÉV operates five suburban railway lines, numbered H5 through H9. Their rolling stock consists mostly of the MX and MXA EMUs, built in the 1970s by LEW Henningsdorf in the GDR.

At Batthyány tér, terminus to the H5 and M2

At Közvágóhíd, terminus to the H6

At Szentlélek tér, on the H5

Interior

A single vehicle has been refurbished due to the series' high age, seen here at Batthyány tér

Funicular

There's a funicular from the bank of the Danube to Budapest Castle. Interestingly, it does not use an Abt-style switch but is double-tracked for its entire length.

Railways

Hungary no longer has a strong railway manufacturing industry, so in terms of modern vehicles, you won't see anything too surprising here. The Taurus, Vectron and TRAXX families are very common in terms of locomotives, and the Stadler FLIRT and KISS are mainstays of MÁV's suburban network.

However, many older vehicles are still in service and some of them are a lot more interesting.

A KISS at Budapest-Keleti station. The KISS is so uninteresting to me that I didn't take a single better photo of one during my entire stay.

A pair of FLIRTs at Budapest-Deli station

The 416 series was built by Metrowagonmasch and, despite its retro looks, is actually from the 2000s. Photo taken at Budapest-Deli station.

The V43 series was built by Hungarian manufacturer Ganz starting in 1963. They are still a common sight today. Seen here at Budapest-Nyugati next to a Czech Vectron on an international train.

This one was spotted at Budapest-Deli, on a rake of what appears to be former Deutsche Reichsbahn rolling stock.

Still at Budapest-Deli, a largely unroofed station.

This akiem locomotive leased to MÁV is a former SNCF BB36000. The location is still Budapest-Deli, and the first car of the train also appears to be ex-DR.

I assume that these two shunters are used to provide train heating. Their pantographs have been removed with a simple cable connecting them to the overhead wire.

A shunter at Budapest-Kelenföld station, perhaps the larger sister of the Children Railway's locomotive?

A 448 series shunter at Budapest-Keleti. The first car of the train appears to be an ex-ÖBB "Schlierenwagen".

Axle generators are still a common sight in Hungary. They provide electricity for train lighting and heating in the absence of head-end power. To the left, on the axle, sits a gearbox, which is connected via a cardan shaft to the actual generator mounted on the bogie.

Footnotes

I am being deliberately vague here because giving an exact number (like "the third-oldest") would require a definition of "metro", a term which is notoriously hard to nail down. Thousands of flamewars have been fought over it. ↩

Another blog update

Sun, 15 Feb 2026 13:18:00 GMT

So recently I discovered that the maintainer of my previous blogging software (Hugo) had added agent prompts to his project's repo.

This was a massive red flag to me, as I strictly oppose the use of generative AI trained on stolen labour, both within corporate spaces and in the open-source community which is being stolen from by companies like Anthropic. However, asking the maintainer for clarification on whether he uses AI led to him banning me from his forum, removing my question, refusing to let me know the length of the ban or which rule I had violated, and ultimately accusing me of "hijacking" a changelog thread which explicitly referenced the commit that added to agent prompts and "borderline trolling". After further prompting via Github, I finally got him to clarify that yes, he does indeed use AI.

For me, this led to an immediate decision to no longer use Hugo. If bep, maintainer of Hugo, had simply answered my original question with a "yes", downgrading to a pre-AI version of Hugo would have been an option. However, bep's extremely hostile behaviour towards criticism and the community's general support of his position to both use the Copyright Infringement Machine to hallucinate code for him and to refuse to even disclose this made me want to disengage with the project entirely.

On top of that, during my experiments in extending my website with some custom code like the gallery, I had grown extremely frustrated with Hugo for a variety of reasons:

The documentation is just awful. It fails to explain basic terminology, is a pain to navigate, and doesn't even manage to put its "Getting started" section at the top of its ToC.
The templating language, with its odd insistence of using polish notation for everything, is very uncomfortable for me to work on.
The API is missing a lot of conveniences I'm used to from modern programming languages, like lambdas. Its collection API, for example, is painfully restrictive.
Some API decisions are just baffling, like the semantics of Collections.append being different on empty vs. non-empty lists on certain operations. This is an entirely solved problem, to be clear: if Hugo simply had two different functions like Java's List.add(item) and List.addAll(items) (or any other programming language I have ever used), there would be zero ambiguity.

I also took a look at some other static site generators and asked for disclosure of AI usage, but ultimately decided that I do not want to learn another template language, sift through another set of incomplete docs, and just hope for the best.

Instead, I decided to clobber together my own static site generator, in a programming language I actually like (Java) and using tech I have worked with before (Commonmark-java, Thymeleaf, and some Apache Commons stuff, mainly). I do not care about whatever the "Jamstack" is or about extensibility or configurability - I wanted to build something tailor-made to this specific website.

As such, I do basically all the heavy lifting in Java, with the Thymeleaf templates being as slim on logic as possible. Features like automatic generation of thumbnails are handled by Java (with the actual image processing outsourced to ImageMagick). There is little configurability, because I simply do not need it. Metadata for posts is severely limited to what I actually use.

With those constraints, I was able to clobber something together that works during a five-day vacation, with plenty of time left for actual vacationing.

I was a bit reluctant about this course of action at first, because while I now control the site generator itself, it relies on a long list of dependencies and I simply cannot vet them all for AI use. I did look at my main dependencies and could not find obvious signs of AI use, but at some point I just have to hope for the best. At least, I can now decide to just freeze a certain dependency if its maintainers go all-in on the Copyright Infringement Machine.

The upside is that I will be able to add new features to the site with far more ease because I can now work in a language I am 100% comfortable with. I already added pagination to the gallery, and have a couple more things I want to do in the very near future. I will also never have to hear the word "jamstack" again!

On the other side, some things are still a bit unpolished:

Some URLs will no longer work.
The CSS is still very basic, because I decided to forgo third-party themes. I am, unfortunately, not a web designer, but I'm beginning to prefer "SelfHTML chic" over seeing the same five blog templates again and again.
The search function is gone, for the time being. I was never fully happy with how it worked, anyway.

The next post will be about my recent vacation and funny subway trains. I promise. No more blog drama. But before I go, I would like to link two blog posts that illustrate at least part of why I am so worried about the rise of AI in open-source spaces:

A Quick Blog Update

Wed, 28 Jan 2026 08:30:00 GMT

As I continue to build this blog into a real "digital home" for myself, I have now added all photos from my old Flickr account to the blog.

All of them are present in the gallery! Please note that I have automatically migrated some image metadata like titles and description from Flickr, but many of the older photos only have descriptions or titles in German, and some do not have any text associated with them.

I might go over all of them and polish their metadata in the future, but this is a big time commitment and I cannot make any promises on that.

Japan Vacation, Part 4: Interesting and/or Amusing Signs

Wed, 21 Jan 2026 19:27:00 GMT

This is just a collection of signs and ads I came across and found amusing and/or interesting during my stay in Japan.

Note: Photos are not in chronological order.

Earthquake Evaculation Monument

The interesting thing about this sign is its mounting system, not its content.

This sign at Tokyo Station is very easy to understand, but I am surprised it is necessary in spite of the very clear, multilingual displays at the platform.

"In case you can not lock: After another user finished operation, please retry locking"

I think this is because the payment terminal used for this coin locker can only process one user at a time, but the sign is not very clear to me. (The coin locker worked fine, though.)

At most stations, every exit has a number (or sometimes an alphanumerical code), which is shown on signage and on Google Maps to help you quickly find the correct exit. At labyrinthine stations like Tokyo, this is absolutely vital. Exit 20 is where the shuttle bus to my hotel arrived and departed. It is in the Yaechika underground mall on the Yaesu side of the station. This is kind of the "back entrance" of the station, with the iconic redbrick building on the opposite Marunouchi side.

The platform displays on many JR stations display out-of-service trains, including their exact time of departure.

Fare displays like this are typical at many smaller train companies. This one is on a Choshi Denki Tetsudo train. Fares are paid when exiting. The train has just left Choshi, and the next stop is Nakanocho. Passengers who boarded at Choshi (銚子) would have to pay 180 yen when exiting at Nakanocho. The train has not yet stopped at any other stations, which is why no other fares are shown.

Interestingly, Hiroden in Hiroshima also uses monitors like these despite having a flat fee of 240 yen for every trip regardless of distance¹.

Choshi Denki Tetsudo is Robot Friendly.

Diacritics (like ä, é, ū or Č) are often a challenge for typesetters because there are a lot of them, and many fonts do not have a full assortment of them. The most common system for transcribing Japanese into English uses macrons to indicate long vowels (e. g. Tokyo would correctly be transcribed as Tōkyō). I ignore them in this post because typing them on a German keyboard is a pain in the ass².

It's not too uncommon to see misprinted macrons on Japanese signs. For example, the main font of this sign clearly did not contain glyphs for them, and so had to fall back to a very different font with an entirely different line weight for all characters with macrons. Seeing the Japanese themselves struggle with this definitely makes me feel less guilty about my lazyness!

Better buy your stuff quickly, because this vending machine will go on vacation starting tomorrow.

"Be careful about the choice of the button."

Considering that this label is related to emergency equipment, this odd phrasing really annoys me. This is one of those contexts where having your stuff proofread to ensure it is clearly worded and gets the intended meaning across with as little risk of confusion as possible is extremely important.

"The special secret of making dreams come true can be summarized in four C's. They are Curiosity, Confidence, Courage and Constancy."

This sign advertises a maid café, and I don't even think there is anything wrong with it, strictly speaking, but "constancy" certainly was not the word I expected.

Tee hee hee. I am mentally fourteen years old and this is funny to me.

There's a gazillion³ different transcription systems for Japanese. JR usually is fairly consistent in which system they use on their station signage, but this sign at Shin-Ōsaka station deviates from the usual system.

At Tokyo Teleport station, the designers apparently assumed passengers could teleport, or at least phase through solid matter.

Taxis and cars cannot be picked up in this area.

Picking up cars is perfectly legal everywhere else in Tokyo, though⁴.

Most platforms in Japan have markers for the door positions of stopping trains. Those can get complicated quickly when a platform is shared between trains of different lengths and configurations, especially when things like the number of doors per car also vary.

This platform is shared between the Musashino Line (武蔵野線, left side, orange, eight-car E231 trains) and the Keiyo Line (京葉線, right side, red, ten-car E233 trains). The door at this position would be on car 2 for the Musashino Line or car 4 for the Keiyo Line. On the Keiyo Line, the car at this position would contain a priority seat area and a mildly air-conditioned car (弱冷房車), where cooling during the summer is a bit weaker than in the rest of the train.

Some station displays show the position of approaching trains in a little diagram. The next train to Kawasaki (川崎) is currently stopped at the previous station.

This sign at Nagano caught my eye because it could be read as "Idol". Katakana are generally used to transcribe foreign loan words, but are limited to representing syllables that are present in the Japanese language and therefor often have some imprecision or ambiguity. I assume the sign is actually supposed to read "Idle", as it is on a bay platform, but this took me a while to figure out.

Cartoon injuries are funny.

English signage at Kyoto's railway museum is limited and some of it is a bit bad. I am not sure what "Japan's first many-car train set electric railcars" should be "EMUs" is supposed to mean - one might assume that it is an awkward way of phrasing "Japan's first EMU", but the 80 Series⁵ was not Japan's first EMU by a long shot. I assume based from the kanji that it is supposed to be "Japan's first long EMU", which is of course a bit of a synthetic superlative, and an oddly ill-defined one at that.

The 80 Series genuinely was an impressive vehicle with some massive innovations over earlier EMUs, with some of those innovations paving the way towards the Shinkansen, and it massively improved on passenger comfort, too, enabling it to serve medium-distance services that previously were only viable with locomotive-hauled trains. As such, it genuinely has shaped the face of Japan's railways today⁶. As such, it is a bit sad that this sign utterly fails to convey the significance of this vehicle to visitors.

As we say in Germany when someone drops a really nasty fart: "Ey Alda, was bist'n du für ein Backenmozart?"

(We don't actually say that.)

I don't think the car is supposed to be on the platform, though.

I did not notice any wet roads around this sign.

This entrance / exit is nice. But it is no elevator.

I've heard of geomagnetic reversal, but this is the first time I've had to think about it while finding my way around a station.

(This sign actually points to Shimo-Kitazawa's former North Exit. Apparently, the station was recently rebuilt.)

I am not entirely sure this sign is actually helpful to people with impaired vision, but at least it is equally useless to people from a wide variety of countries. I'm not sure what kind of dotcode this is (it is not a QR code, as is evident by the missing "eyes" used for determining QR code alignment and size), and my phone apparently can't read it.

Children usually pay half fare, in this case 120 yen. ↩
One of my older posts had correct transcriptions for all Japanese names, but it took me an hour or so to figure out an AutoHotKey solution that allowed me to type macrons without having to either copy them from a symbol table or memorize their Unicode values. I have changed computers since then and simply cannot be arsed to set up the same solution on my new machine. Ironically, typing macrons is really easy on Android! ↩
Actually four or so ↩
This is not legal advice. ↩
The sign refers to this as a 86 Series car. Different cars of a consist would have different series designations, but the whole train is usually referred to as the "80 Series". To some extent, this still applies today, e.g. JR East's E231 Series uses "E230" numbers for some types of car. ↩
This is discussed in "Birth of the Shinkansen: The Origin Story of the World-First Bullet Train" by Tetsuo Shimomae, ISBN 978-9811665387. ↩

Railway Vacation in Japan, Week 3 & Conclusions

Tue, 13 Jan 2026 12:34:00 GMT

Monday, December 29th - Transfer to Tokyo

Time to get back to Tokyo. I stayed in a different hotel near Shimbashi station this time. Since all my hotels were budget options, I wanted to hedge my bets in case one of them absolutely sucked, but all the places I stayed were pretty nice.

I had reserved a seat on the Shinkansen in advance, but woke up way too early. I was still able to change my reservation to an earlier train, but still had to wait an hour for a train that had a window seat on the left side available.

Worth it.

Shimbashi station plaza, as seen from the northbound Yamanote/Keihin-Tohoku Line platform.

Tuesday, December 30th - Oarai

I had rewatched "Girls und Panzer", one of my guilty pleasure anime, shortly before my trip, and was curious to see the town that series is partially set in. Oarai is in Ibaraki prefecture and can be reached in a bit less than two hours from Tokyo.

I took the Tokiwa Limited Express to Mito Station, where the waiting rooms are modelled after the E653 Series EMUs used on many Joban Line express trains.

There, I needed to change onto the Kashima Rinkai Tetsudo (KRT). Unfortunately, my lens hood had come loose and it took me a while to notice.

Oarai Station, as seen in the anime

Oarai Marine Tower is also prominently seen in the anime, and hosts a Girls und Panzer-themed café. Unfortunately, it was closed in the days leading up to New Year's Eve.

Oarai Seaside Station, an outdoor mall, appears in the anime as well, although it feels more cramped in real life than in the anime. There's a Girls und Panzer fan shop here, so I browsed for a while, looked at their neat dioramas and bought myself a nice t-shirt.

After that, I decided to just take a walk around town. This boulevard running in parallel to the beach feels oddly Italian to me for some reason. Seen in the background is the sign for Mentai Park Oarai, the visitor's center (Google Maps calls it a "theme park" but that might be a bit of a stretch) of a factory producing spicy fish roe.

This massive concrete torii stands at the approach to Isosaki shrine.

Gokokuji Temple

As you can tell, I really enjoyed just walking through a random town and getting some snapshots of everyday scenery.

There's a few themed shops and cafes scattered around the town. "SdKfz" is short for "Sonderkraftfahrzeug", part of the Wehrmacht's vehicle classification system, and I highly doubt this name would fly in Germany.

Back at Oarai Station after a solid 5km walk. This 6000 Series DMU is on a stabling move.

The flowerpots match the trains.

A E531 Series EMU at Mito. As this area uses alternating current, the DC-only E231 and E233 Series trains that operate much of Tokyo's suburban network can't make it up here. The E531 is a derivative of the E231, and design-wise is the E233's predecessor.

A Hitachi Limited Express

This "safety bell" at Mito Station appears to commemorate some accident, but I could not find out a lot of details about it.

My train left on a return trip towards Oarai.

This KiHa E131 (not to be confused with the E131 EMU) is headed for the Suigun Line.

Wednesday, December 31st - Tokyo

As I did not know how New Year's Eve would affect the load on the trains, I decided to stay within Tokyo, or at least reasonably close to it, for the day. As it turned out, the local trains were fairly empty during the day.

First, I headed towards Tokyo Tower, which was fairly close to my hotel. On the way, I came across this small shrine.

Note the small bonsai tree matching the tower.

While this is an impressive building, I still prefer the Eiffel Tower. Due to its age and more antiquated construction technique, it simply feels more impressive to me as an accomplishment. Tokyo Tower also doesn't replicate some of the sillier features of its Paris counterpart, like the curved elevators along the base legs.

The surrounding area also cannot be compared to the Champs-Mars at all.

I'm sorry, Japan. I hope you still let me in when I return, despite our different tastes in architecture.

Next on the to-do list was that one iconic level crossing in Yoyogi.

This one?

No, not this one. The next one to the south.

Yes. This one.

This sits on the southern approach to Shinjuku Station. The bridge on the left side carries the Yamanote Line, the tracks on the level crossing belong to the Yamanote Freight Line, which despite its name no longer carries any freight and is instead used by Shonan-Shinjuku Line, Saikyo Line and various express trains, like this Narita Express. The bridge on the right side carries the Chuo Line rapid service tracks and the Chuo-Sobu Line, which diverge from the two Yamanote Lines towards Ochanomizu.

With this dense pattern, the level crossing is rarely open for more than a minute or two at a time. This train is running on the Shonan-Shinjuku Line.

Next, I decided to check out Minami-Yono, also on the Saikyo line, which is the neighborhood a character from a novel I am currently reading lives in.

Unfortunately, this area turned out to be fairly boring.

After that, I checked out Shimo-Kitazawa, specifically the music club Shelter, the real-life inspiration behind "Starry" from "Bocchi the Rock". Unfortunately, the area around the club is fairly cramped and they do not seem to like photographers.

I can understand the sentiment, but there was little to no foot traffic around the staircase when I came there, and I could easily have taken a few photos from the staircase without disturbing anybody. Their wording and general attitude comes off as very rude and I left the place with some bitterness instead of photos.

Keio 1700 EMU approaching Shimo-Kitazawa station

After that, I got some dinner, bought beer and crisps at the konbini and returned to my hotel. I was not sure if there would be any fireworks or other celebrations - as far as I could tell, there weren't, but I ended up falling asleep at around 22:30 and might just have slept through them. I didn't see any of the typical garbage the day after, though.

Hatsune Miku is ready to ring in the new year with a cold one from her hometown.

Thursday, January 1st

I wanted to take a trip around those neighborhoods on the west side of the Yamanote Line I had so far skipped, mostly Ikebukuro and Shibuya.

A Sotetsu through-service onto the Saikyo Line at Shinjuku Station

This monument in Ikebukuro features in at least one of the openings for "Durarara!".

The Hachiko statue at Shibuya Station had a long line of people waiting to take selfies in front of them, so I did not get a good photograph. But I did get some Ikinari Steak nearby.

After that, I wanted to check out some of the railway companies I had so far missed, so I went to Yokohama with the Tokyu Toyoko Line and then to Tsurumi via the Keikyu Line.

Keikyu New 1000 Series EMU on a local service at Kanagawa-shimmachi, waiting to be overtaken by an express train

Keikyu 2100 Series EMU on a rapid service

At Tsurumi, I caught the JR Tsurumi Line and headed to Kokudo Station, which is ~~renowned~~ ~~known for~~ occasionally remarked upon for its age and general lack of modernization.

The platform area looks decent enough.

On the way down to street level, things become more rustic.

The station entrance at street level also looks very antiquated.

Still, the station is usable, clean, and even has a toilet, which puts it ahead of many more modern stations of this size in Germany.

On the way back to the hotel, I found out via the info screens on the train that operation on the Utsunomiya Line had been suspended for the rest of the day due to a collision with a road vehicle at a level crossing. Japan's trains are generally very reliable and punctual but in the West, this occasionally gets exaggerated into the trains being always on time and even a minute of delay being worthy of extended apologies by the staff, and to be honest, part of why I wanted to go to Japan so badly was to get a sense of how reliable operations really are. I have mentioned this a few times before, but smaller delays of up to 15 minutes are everyday occurrences. I've been on a train that just stood at a station for three minutes past its departure time for no apparent reason, I saw a Shinkansen depart a minute late because boarding at the station took too long, and there was almost always some delay somewhere in the Tokyo area. That said, punctuality rates definitely are much better in Japan than in any other country I have ever been in, and even the bout of snow on my trip to Himeji had no real operational impact. But you simply cannot make a railway network entirely safe from vehicle or signal malfunctions, medical emergencies, people getting onto the tracks or being hit by trains, or simple overcrowding affecting boarding speeds, or from external factors like vehicles intruding onto railway tracks. Japan can and should serve as evidence that railway systems can be extremely reliable, but it is important not to exaggerate that into perfection.

Sorry, I'll get off my soapbox now.

Friday, January 2nd - Gunma

I headed towards Takasaki to try and ride the 211 Series.

A weird house near my hotel

The HB-E220 hybrid DMU has recently been introduced to the Hachiko line, connecting Takasaki to Hachioji. (No relation to the dog at Shibuya Station.)

Trains from Tokyo to Takasaki are largely operated with the E231 and E233 Series, but most of the trains onward from Takasaki are still run by the 211 Series. I rode this one to Shibukawa (setting for the street racing manga and anime "Initial D"), and another one back to Takasaki.

Saturday, January 3rd - Skytree

I started the day with a short trip along the Imperial Palace, although most of the parts of the palace grounds I was able to access felt like parking lots. Some of them actually were parking lots.

Next up was the Skytree. I don't actually like the Skytree, it is nowhere near as iconic as the Tokyo Tower in my opinion, but still.

It had snowed during the night. Most of it had melted away already, but there were small flakes being blown off the tower constantly.

This odd boat-house-thing is situated in nearby Oyokogawa Shinsui Park.

After that, I went trawling for souvenirs in Akihabara for one last time and packed my bags for the flight home.

Sunday, January 4th

I checked out of the hotel early in the morning, had one last konbini cream puff, took the Keikyu Line to Haneda Airport, stood in line at the baggage drop for almost an hour, and flew home.

Overall impressions

I really enjoyed my trip and would have liked to stay an additional week! Usually I am badly homesick after a week or two.

Overall, I really liked the food. Eating out in Japan is sometimes a bit annoying because, while there are a lot of restaurants, most of them are very, very small. During lunch hours especially, it is common to see long lines. I tried my best to avoid those and search for less crowded restaurants, or eat lunch a bit early, and for the most part I got by without waiting more than a few minutes. Nearly every place I ate had a system for ordering via smartphone, or via a vending machine that takes your order and payment and spits out a ticket to hand over to the staff. At big chains like Matsuya, these machines generally know English, but many ramen places in particular use older machines with physical buttons that are generally only labelled in Japanese. In these cases, Google Translate is unfortunately a must-have unless you speak and read Japanese.

My favourite food was katsu-curry, but I also had some really nice ramen and curry-udon, and I really enjoyed Ikinari Steak's, um, steaks.

A lot of people do not speak English, or only speak very basic English. I do not know enough Japanese to hold a proper conversation, but I can at least string together simple sentences like "do you have X". Some shops have prepared cards or signs the cashiers can point at to clear up any confusion, and the last Ikinari I visited handed me a card that explained how to eat their steaks in English. A bit redundant, but an effort was made. Overall, things felt awkward occasionally, and I had far better luck communicating in English when I stayed in Paris, but got by somehow. Still, I am glad that I have at least some very basic language skills, and would have felt deeply out of place without them.

The Shinkansen and JR's express trains are fairly spacious, and had enough leg room for me despite my large size even in 2nd class. I got my 1st class rail pass mostly due to leg room concerns and because I thought it might be easier to get seats in 1st than in 2nd. In hindsight, my thoughts on this decision are mixed. Even 2nd class in the Shinkansen is more comfortable than Lufthansa's coach class, and some Shinkansen trains have staggeringly little 1st class space. North of Tokyo, trains generally have 1 car of 1st class (Green Car), and an additional car of JR East's Super-Duper-Mega-1st Class, where the "Green Car"/1st Class Rail Pass cannot be used. Worse, some trains on the San'yo Shinkansen have half a car worth of Green Car within an 8-car train, and some even have no Green Car at all. Limited Express trains also tend to have relatively little Green Car space or sometimes none at all. I saw several trains where 1st was booked out and seats were still available in 2nd. 1st class also always requires a seat reservation on Shinkansen and Limited Express trains, whereas most trains have some non-reserved seats in 2nd. The process for reserving seats is a pain in the ass: You can reserve a seat online, but then have to go to a seat reservation machine at the station, present your rail pass, enter your passport number (!) and then get the reservation printed out on paper. It is annoying and unnecessarily customer-hostile.

On the bright side, some local and rapid trains in the Tokyo area also have Green Car space, which does not require a seat reservation, and generally does not nearly as crowded as the 2nd class on those trains. Outside of the Tokyo area, this does not apply.

Most things in Japan just aren't built for someone of my size. Tables at most restaurants felt cramped (although I admittedly mostly went to cheap chain places), with not nearly enough elbow room if sat between two other patrons at the bar (which happened to me frequently). I needed to bow down every time I got onto or off a train and bonked my head more than once. Inside the trains, hand straps and advertisements hanging from the ceiling were so low I had to bow down when passing them, too, and I spent multiple train rides standing with an ad pressed against my head. The longitudinal seats that are installed in most local trains are also not really good for sightseeing out of the windows.

A lot of trains I went on were crowded or overcrowded. I can understand that within the metropolitan areas, where many lines run at high capacity and running even more trains during rush hour just isn't viable. But even the small KiHa I used between Teramae and Wadayama had people standing in off-peak hours. Surely running a single railcar once per hour is not all the infrastructure can take? Surely, adding a second car would be possible if the political will was there. Admittedly, the local trains have extremely low fares, which at least partially excuses the low comfort standards on them. Still, I would be pissed if I had to use trains like that for a daily commute.

There's a lot more, and I am honestly still processing my impressions, but I think I've rambled enough for the time being. Thanks for reading!

Railway Vacation in Japan, Week 2

Tue, 13 Jan 2026 12:00:00 GMT

Monday December 22nd - Transfer to Osaka

With week 1 already over, I hopped onto the Hikari after an awful night of sleep. My original plan was to leave the train at Nagoya and visit the SCMaglev museum. However, this plan failed because storing my luggage near Nagoya station was simply impossible. This came as a bit of a surprise to me, because the trains hadn't even been that full, but the coin lockers were filled to the brim.

So I just had a quick lunch near the station, then hopped onto the next Hikari onwards to Osaka and checked into my hotel. In the evening, I took a short walk around the hotel and grabbed a bite to eat somewhere - I honestly don't even remember where or what.

Tuesday December 23rd - Nara etc

With my health issues being back in control, and my legs rested after the fairly calm previous day, I left the hotel in high spirits but with no clear plans.

The nearest station to my hotel was Kintetsu-Nippombashi, which provides easy access to Nara, which was on my to-do list. In non-railway terms, Nara is notable for being the first "permanent" capital of Japan (although it was quickly succeeded by Kyoto in that role), and its park which is home to a large population of wild deer. In railway terms, I know the Kintetsu Nara line from BVE (see also: my guide on BVE 5), and JR Nara station sees both the 205 Series on services to Kyoto and the 103 Series on the Sakurai Line. Both of these trains are becoming increasingly rare, and the 103 Series is one I absolutely wanted to see. All of that made Nara a must-see destination.

Kintetsu-Nippombashi station

A bus stop in Nara

The deer are not shy at all.

Nanen-do, a Buddhist temple within Nara Park

Next to the park is a four-lane road. The deer are not particularly worried about walking through traffic.

Kintetsu-Nara station is near to Nara Park, but JR Nara station is a bit over a kilometer away, so I took a short walk. I also visited the Taito arcade near JR Nara station to see if they had a Densha de Go! machine but they didn't.

JR Nara Station

The 221 Series is one of JR West's workhorses.

The local train from Kyoto was running with a 205 Series train.

205 Series interior. As my main target today was the 103 Series, I chose not to ride this train and only got a quick snapshot.

birb

Unfortunately, the Sakurai Line train to Takada turned out to be a 227 Series EMU. I chose to get on regardless, hoping that maybe one of the other trains running on the route would be a 103 Series. But the first train to pass us was another 227, and when I left the train at Sakurai to wait for the next train back to Nara, that train also turned out to be a 227.

Signal repeater at Sakurai (JR)

Frustrated, I decided to take the Kintetsu Osaka line back to Osaka.

Split-flap display at Kintetsu-Sakurai station

Wednesday December 24th - Arcade and chill

I felt like I needed another day to rest a bit, and I was also unsure how Christmas would affect traffic, so I decided to walk to a nearby arcade. This time I checked online where I could find a Densha de Go! machine, and at the Taito Station in Osaka-Nippombashi (in walking distance of my hotel), I found not only four of the current (2017) machines but also six older cabinets, including the tramway version which includes Enoshima Dentetsu. Those older cabinets all still have CRT monitors, and their graphic fidelity makes recognizing upcoming stations, speed limits, and signals very tough. It is also easy to get a game over on those older machines, whereas the 2017 iteration will almost always let you drive the distance you have paid for (which, at 500yen for 4 to 6 stations, is rather pricey compared to 100yen for a similar amount of playing time on the older machines) and then give you a "pass" or "fail" ranking based on your performance. Still, playing through those older machines, all of which have different controls based on the vehicles represented in the game, was a fascinating experience. Even the older machines have a "butt kicker", a device to induce small knocks into the driver seat to emulate the feeling of rail joints and points, but the 2017 cabinet, especially in its large version, really offers the highest amount of immersion I've ever had in a train simulator, with additional monitors for the side windows, a touchscreen for the train information display (which also has interactive features to emulate the Japanese safety practice of "pointing and calling"), and a master controller lever that simply feels amazing to operate. The whole thing is not quite built for my 1.95m tall European ass, though. Getting my legs below the driver's desk in a way that allows me to operate the pedal for the horn was uncomfortable as all hell.

I also tried a few of the rhythm games on offer, and would occasionally go into random arcades to play a few rounds of Taiko no Tatsujin, Gitadora, Chuunithm, or that one weird round one that I don't know the name of.

Thursday December 25th - Kyoto Railway Museum

Time for railway museum #2, in Kyoto this time.

JR's rapid trains between Osaka and Kyoto were once again "severely" delayed, by a whole 11 minutes.

As a consolation price for the events of December 23rd, this museum at least has a 103 Series car on static display - but seeing a train is one thing, riding it, hearing it and feeling its controls operate is an entirely different thing.

Overall, I did like this museum but prefer the one in Saitama. Kyoto is far more protective of its train interiors, so visitors can not enter most of the vehicles shown. Some trains are also displayed in such a way that looking at anything below the floor is impossible, and that just happens to be where all the interesting technology is.

On the other hand, Kyoto has some exhibits on signalling technology and a large collection of steam engines. I care about the former, but the latter is not really a selling point for me. I am far more interested in electric traction, especially when it comes to Japan. I still think the museum is among the best railway museums I've seen, but Saitama has it beat.

After that, I took a trip to Otsu with the Keihan Keishin Line, an interurban line which shares tracks with the Kyoto metro, then runs on its own tracks for a bit, navigating some tight turns and steep climbs before street-running on the final stretch in Otsu. This is another line I know from BVE. For the return trip, I used a JR train.

Keihan car 608 near Keihan-otsukyo station, carrying full advertising for Wuthering Waves. This station is in walking distance of JR's Otsukyo station.

For my return to Osaka, I decided to use a Limited Express on the Hankyu Kyoto line, which - say it with me! - I know from BVE. I got lucky and could sit directly behind the cab and get views on the track.

At Osaka-Umeda

For dinner, I visited a small izakaya near to my hotel.

Friday December 26th - Himeji, 103 Series

I had a backup plan for seeing the 103 Series in operation, which was the Bantan Line in Himeji. With this being my last weekday in Osaka, and the weather being reasonably amenable to photography, I decided today was my best shot.

Himeji is served by the Sanyo Shinkansen, but due to the location of my hotel, the Shinkansen station in Osaka, and the effort involved with seat reservations, just using a rapid train from Osaka station turned out to be faster.

To my relief, I was almost immediately greeted by a parked 103 series train.

The Bantan line 103 series units (103-3500 subseries) are a bit odd. These are two-car trains, which are made up of two former middle cars converted into end cars in the late 90es. While they look a lot like the classic 103-0 from the outside, their cabs are vastly different from those of the original series.

103-3500 cab

Classic 103 Series cab, for comparison (Kyoto Railway Museum)

My train only went to Fukusaki, so I ate a karaage teishoku there, and continued to Teramae with the next train. The three photos above are all from Fukusaki.

I continued to Teramae with the next train. Teramae is where the electrified section of the Bantan Line ends, and the Teramae - Wadayama section is operated by diesel railcars. Unfortunately, the connection between the two services is a bit shit, and the train to Wadayama left 35 minutes after the train from Himeji and Fukusaki had arrived. While waiting, sleet began to fall, which soon turned to thick snowflakes.

Our KiHa 41 still arrived at Wadayama on time. Meanwhile, I had booked a seat for the Kounotori Limited Express back to Osaka, via Takarazuka and Amagasaki.

The three photos above are all from Wadayama, the last one shows my train approaching.

Back down in Osaka, the weather was still sunny and dry.

I had some curry udon for dinner near my hotel.

Saturday December 27th - Osaka

I decided to stay in Osaka for the day, and do some things that would not require too much walking or standing, because I was honestly fairly tired.

Thus, the first item on the list was Hankai's streetcar.

A 501 Series car approaching Ebisucho, the northern terminus of the Hankai Line.

501 Series cab

701 Series meeting 501 Series at Abikomichi. Hankai Line trams usually end here, and Uemachi Line trams continue southwards to Sakai.

Stop request button on a 601 Series car. The lamp reads "とまります".

601 Series cab

The 601 Series car the previous two photos were taken on, at Hamadera-ekimae, the southern terminus of the Uemachi Line.

Points lever at Hamadera-ekimae

From Hamadera-ekimae, I took a walk through Hamadera Park, the station's namesake, ending up at Takashinohama, the terminus of a short branch line on the Nankai Main Line. Hankai (the tram operator) used to be part of Nankai, and their lines roughly run in parallel, with the tram having more stops, but these days, the two companies are distinct.

The neighborhood

Takaishi Shrine can be seen from Takashinohama's elevated platform

A Nankai 2000 Series EMU approaching Takashinohama. This train only goes to nearby Hagoromo station, where I changed onto a Nankai Main Line train back to Osaka-Namba.

A Nankai 6000 Series EMU at Osaka-Namba

Afterwards, I played some more arcade games and returned to the hotel early to relax and plan the next day's trip.

Sunday December 28th - Hiroshima

This was my last day in Kansai, and while there was still a lot of stuff I wanted to see and do, the most pressing thing on my list was Hiroshima.

I find it hard to write about this, because the one and only thing most people know about Hiroshima is the horrendous nuclear bombing that destroyed large parts of the cities at the end of World War II. I visited the Peace Park, and the Peace Memorial, the remnants of a former exhibition hall right below the nuclear blast. I do not think my photos can do justice to visiting the place and won't show them here.

But Hiroshima was rebuilt and has more than a million people living in it today. My second reason to come here was to visit the Hiroshima Dentetsu streetcar system, which is the largest in the country at a route length of 35.1 km. Japan is not really a streetcar country these days, and it seems the international tram renaissance has not really taken a hold. For example, my current hometown, Munich, has 83 km of tram lines on top of 95 km worth of subway lines. Dortmund, which is far smaller than Hiroshima, has a 75 km tram network, with a significant portion of underground or elevated lines.

Hiroshima Dentetsu (a.k.a. Hiroden) operates an eclectic mix of vehicles, including a few that survived the nuclear bomb, a variety of cars bought from other Japanese streetcar operators as they closed down, and a fleet of more modern articulated units. Some of those are retrofits, some are domestic builds, and some are Siemens Combino. For a while, two used Duewag GT8 from Dortmund were also operated, but both of these are now struck from the register.

A 3900 Series "Green Liner" (66 seats) meets a 700 Series car (37 seats) near Tatemachi station

The 1900 Series was originally built for Kyoto's streetcars, built from 1957.

Another 700 Series car

This photo was taken at Hiroden-miyajima-guchi, endpoint of the Hiroden Miyajima Line. This line is licensed and operated as a railway between Hiroden-nishi-hiroshima (in front of JR's Nishi-Hiroshima station) and Hiroden-miyajima-guchi, but operated with regular streetcars which continue onto the streetcar network to reach Hiroshima station. This 5100 Series "Green Mover MAX" train is painted in JR West's "Red Wing" color scheme used on local trains around Hiroshima as part of a cross-promotion.

Miyajima-guchi has a small harbour for ferries connecting to the shrine island of Miyajima ("Miyajima", 宮島, literally meaning "shrine island), a main tourist attraction of the area. But Miyajima was not in my plans for the day, as I had limited time.

After some crisscrossing through the city and checking out the Astram, yet another people mover system which turned out to be hard to get good photos of thanks to its platform screen doors, I caught this "Red Wing" 227 Series EMU (a real one, not a Hiroden fake this time) at Omachi.

With the light fading already, I had a beef bowl for dinner, did a bit of shopping and checked out a few arcades in the city center, and then hung around at the station for a while. I had booked a reservation for a specific train the day before, because the Shinkansen was fairly packed near the turn of the years, and because I had already printed out the reservation at the seat reservation machine in the morning, changing it was no longer an option.

A Geibi Line train made up of a KiHa 40 railcar and KiHa 47 2-car DMU

My Hiroden day pass. I had to scratch off the desired date by myself with a 1-yen coin.

While waiting for my train on the Shinkansen platforms, I caught this 500 Series Shinkansen (right side) and a 700 Series in Hikari Rail Star livery. With Hikari Rail Star operations winding down, I suppose both of these are becoming rather rare. This was the only 500 Series I saw during my entire stay, and I really like its design, although it feels very similar to the German ICE 3, designed by the same person. I always thought of the 500 Series as derivative of the ICE 3, but it turns out the 500 Series is actually older.

500 Series detail

Changelog

2026-01-22: Corrected a photo description - the Hikari Rail Star train is a 700 Series unit, not a N700 Series unit.

Railway Vacation in Japan, Week 1

Tue, 06 Jan 2026 16:00:00 GMT

I am in Japan! (At least I am while writing this part.)

I've wanted to go there since 2018, finally had the funds to go in early 2020, and then COVID struck. After that, various personal things got into the way, and only this summer did I finally decided to spend my christmas vacation this year there.

The itinerary was rather simple: one week in Tokyo, then one in Osaka, then another week in Tokyo. All direct flights from Munich to Japan go to Haneda, and I did not want to take a multi-hour train trip directly before going onto a 14-hour flight. Thus, staying in Tokyo for the first and last part of the trip, and bracketing Kansai in between, seemed to make sense.

Monday December 15th - Arrival

South Japan was tightly covered in clouds, but around Ōsaka, the cloud cover vanished and we descended with amazingly clear views of Fuji and the shipping around Tokyo.

The rest of the day was mostly filled with the usual: immigration formalities, picking up tickets (a JR Rail Pass and a Suica IC card for everything else), trying to get my eSIM to work, checking in at the hotel, and getting something to eat after the awful food on the plane. On the way to the hotel, I already got to scratch the Tokyo Monorail off my to-do list.

My hotel was near Bakurocho station on the JR Sobu Rapid line. Bakurocho station might be the ugliest and worst-maintained station I saw during my entire trip, despite being relatively new (opened 1972). It features an indoor waterfall at platform level, and this amazing liminal space.

Tuesday December 16th - Chiba

Chiba has the world's longest suspended monorail system, at 15.2 kilometers. My goal was to ride the entire system, which can easily be accomplished in two hours or so. I took some nice photos of the monorail itself, and some of the connecting JR East railway lines in the process.

Chiba Urban Flyer interior - rather fancy for urban transport

The Chiba monorail uses the SAFEGE system, which is also used in Dortmund and Düsseldorf. However, the German systems (built by Siemens) use platform doors on all stations, and the Chiba Urban Monorail does not. In this, it rather resembles the significantly older Wuppertaler Schwebebahn. Passengers could walk onto the "rails" and right off the edge of the platform, which is something I was surprised to see on a system built this recently (1988).

Unlike the German systems, the Chiba Urban Monorail also has human drivers on all trains, whereas the smaller German systems are automated. This makes for an interesting contrast.

These two photos of 209 series trains were taken at Tsuga station.

From the monorail, one can see those two odd vehicles. I assume they are used as work / inspection vehicles, but being modelled after the E233 series trains makes them look quite funny. Apologies for the low-quality snapshot.

A monorail train at Kencho-mae, the terminus of Line 1.

Another 209 series train at Hon-Chiba station, a short walk from Kencho-mae.

Wednesday December 17th - Misc

I wanted to rest my legs, which were a-hurtin'. But ultimately I still ended up walking and / or standing a lot.

As I woke up early and the trains in the city were still absolutely packed thanks to rush hour, I decided to just jump onto some empty-ish outbound train and spend some time just cruising around. This took me to Mitaka on the Chuo Line, and after walking around a bit and getting my bearings, I decided to ride the Seibu Tamagawa Line, one station over at Musashi-Sakai. It uses Seibu New 101 Series EMUs, which are delightfully retro trains from the 1970s.

From the Tamagawa line's endpoint in Koremasa, I took the short walk to JR's Minami-Tama station on the Nambu Line, which was currently experiencing "severe delays" according to Google. The most severe delay I actually saw was 13 minutes, which by German standards is not severe at all.

This Nambu Line E233 EMU is currently crossing the Tama river.

This unit has just crossed the bridge and is now entering Minami-Tama station. I remembered this spot well from JR East Train Simulator.

I took the severely delayed Nambu Line to Inadazutsumi. It was only around 11am then, but my feet were reaching their limit already, so I decided to take a Keio train from there to Shinjuku, do some shopping there and return to the hotel for the rest of the day. I wanted to pick up a copy of the Nintendo Switch remaster of classic dating sim Tokimeki Memorial, because getting games shipped halfway across the world is prohibitively expensive, and I did not have to search for long at Shinjuku's BIC Camera.

Keio train at Shinjuku station. Some Keio trains end in the company's own underground terminus, whereas others use the Toei Subway's station and continue onwards to the Toei Shinjuku Line. This system is built on a 1,372mm / 4ft 6in gauge, unique among Tokyo's subway lines and extremely rare elsewhere.

Thursday December 18th - Railway Museum, Omiya

I had a couple of railway museums on my list, and the first one I visited was the one in Saitama.

It's a short train trip to Omiya from Tokyo, about half an hour, and then one stop on the "New Shuttle", a people mover system which travels alongside the Shinkansen tracks.

After arriving to the Railway Museum's station, I was immediately greeted by rows and rows of gachapon machines selling various railway-related goods, from tiny plastic models to fridge magnets of station signs and the customary keychains. There was also a Densha de Go! machine and I had a short go on it, although I only had enough coins with me for a single station. Gachapon and arcade machines still are usually cash-only, and worse, they are very specific about what coins they take (usually, only 100円 coins). Sometimes, large clusters of gachapon machines have a money changing machine next to them, but this time, no such luck.

Anyway, onward to the museum. Some notable exhibits include Japan's first-ever steam locomotive, a EF55 streamlined electric engine (only two were ever built, as streamlining was absolutely unnecessary for a locomotive that only ran at 95km/h in service), a 0-series and 200-series Shinkansen car as well as a double-decker E1 Shinkansen car. There is also a small "training area" where kids can drive miniature cars on a small layout with real signals and signage to learn about operational principles. Overall, I think it is an interesting museum and well worth a visit.

After leaving the museum, I stumbled across an Ikinari Steak store and decided to have lunch there. Their steaks are served only lightly cooked and then served on a hot iron plate, on which you can cook it yourself as you want. I really enjoyed the meal and visited several other Ikinari Steak stores during my stay. Thanks to the weak yen, it was a very affordable option to get some really nice meat. Their yuzu sauce is also delicious, but I prefer steaks without sauce.

On the way back, I decided to finally try and find out how to actually use the Shinkansen. As my JR Rail Pass was first-class and all first-class cars in JR express trains are reserved, this is always a bit of a hassle. You can book reservations directly via the Rail Pass website, but you then need to go to a reservation machine at the station to get your reservation printed out. This seems to be very unnecessary to me, and the process of printing the reservation is also unnecessarily convoluted as you are required to enter your passport number every single time.

Friday December 19th - Choshi

While the Shinkansen and Tokyo's high capacity urban rail system are the face of train transport in Japan, there are also many small rural lines which often struggle with poor funding. For us railfans, those lines can be a blessing in disguise: For budget reasons, many of them run old trains acquired on the cheap from bigger railroads.

One of them that caught my eye was the Choshi Electric Railway (Choshi Denki Tetsudo) on the Chiba peninsula. So once again I headed towards Chiba, then onwards via the Sobu Line. With the Shiosai Limited Express, the journey takes about 1h50. Unfortunately, I once again had to make an advance reservation, and then woke up almost two hours before my alarm was set to go off, so I had some time to kill. Time for some Shinkansen photos.

The bus station in front of Choshi station. JR East and Choshi Electric Railway both use this station.

I got lucky and their oldest train, a 2000 Series EMU, which used to be Iyo Railway 800 Series EMUs, and Keio 2010 Series EMUs before that. They were built in 1962. Interestingly, the two cars of this EMU have different fronts. Car 2002 has no front door, whereas car 2502 (shown here) has. This is because at their original operator, Keio, two of these units would usually be coupled back to back.

The small building behind the EMU is the border between Choshi Electric Railway's and JR East's sections of the platforms, and a IC card reader is situated there. Behind that building, a local train towards Chiba operated with another 209 Series EMU can be seen.

For comparison, this is car 2002. Due to the light situation at the time, I could not get a better photo of this end.

The train interior is rather quaint. The most modern thing is the big monitor next to the cab which will display fare information. When driver-only (ワンマン) operation is in effect, passengers are supposed to pay the correct amount when deboarding the train.

The stations are small but well-kept.

I rode the train from Choshi to its opposite terminus at Tokawa, 6.4 kilometers away. There, I deboarded and took a walk to search for nice photo spots.

The train, meanwhile, headed back to Choshi.

The next train would not arrive for another 50 minutes or so, which meant I had some time to walk down to the sea, then walk to the next station in search for a good spot.

Train photography consists mostly of waiting. After having found a spot near Inuboh station, I still had 20 minutes to kill before the train would return. Watching this feline trespasser walk across railway property helped pass the time.

This kitty, however, correctly chose to use the level crossing.

(No cats were harmed in the making of this blogpost.)

Finally, the train arrived. Mission accomplished. Time to rush to the station to catch the return trip. At the station, I also bought a pack of rice crackers, which the railway sells to prop up its finances. Those crackers apparently account for more revenue than the railway itself. They were tasty.

Back at Choshi.

Unfortunately, the Shiosai limited express operates very irregularly. There are four trains from Choshi to Tokyo a day, departing at 7:42, 10:11, 12:22 and 17:35. That's not a very regular pattern, and services are focused on the main load direction (towards Tokyo in the morning, and out of Tokyo in the evening). Thus I had to use the local train, and change at Sakura.

Saturday December 20th - Yokohama and Mishima

I decided to go to Yokohama - however, when I arrived, it turned out the weather was... not great. After five days of sunshine, it was now raining. A lot.

I paid a quick visit to the Akarenga Warehouse, a set of Victorian-style redbrick warehouses, formerly part of the Yokohama harbour and now used as a shopping mall after the surrounding area has been redeveloped. These buildings are featured in the 90s video game "Racing Lagoon" which I became obsessed with for a while this autumn, and seeing them in real life was interesting. Around this area, there are also the remains of Yokohama Minato (Harbour) station.

But after a short walk around this area, I decided I was not in the mood to get drenched, and would much rather just watch the scenery from a train to wherever. So I took the ropeway back to Sakuragicho, which offered a nice view of the area. Then, I took a short ride on both lines of the Yokohama subway. While the system only has two lines, they still somehow managed to build them to completely different standards, as the Blue Line is using conventional EMUs and the Green Line is using a linear motor system.

A Green Line train approaching Center Minami

I decided to ride the Odoriko Limited Express to Atami, my first foray into JR Central territory. Since Tokyo is in JR East's area and Osaka in JR West's, I did not get to see a whole lot of JR Central's conventional railways. (The Shinkansen between Tokyo and Osaka is operated by JR Central in its entirety.)

I then went onwards to Mishima, two stations further down the Tokaido Line, on this lovely local train. All the following photos were taken there.

This train is owned by the Izuhakone Railway, whose line diverges from JR's Tokaido Line here in Mishima. The Odoriko Limited Express I took to get to Atami actually continues onto their line and serves popular tourist destinations among the Izu peninsula. (If I remember correctly, a big chunk of this year's anime "There's No Freaking Way I'll Be Your Lover! Unless..." is set here.)

This sign means "Points Limit 45 km/h".

From there, I returned to Tokyo via the Tokaido Shinkansen. In the evening, I did a bit of shopping in Akihabara and pulled a nice gacha capsule.

Sunday December 21st - Nagano. Why.

Tokyo's many commuter lines see a relatively high turnover of vehicles. Thus, if you want to see older trains, you usually have to go out of the city.

For this reason, I decided to go to Nagano. There, I was hoping to see the JR 211 Series, as well as the various second-hand vehicles used by Nagano Dentetsu and Shinano Railway. Unfortunately, Shinano Railway were only operating their more modern vehicles today, and their JR 115 and 169 Series trains were nowhere to be seen. Some health issues also reared their head, getting in the way of extensive photography and forcing me to return to Tokyo earlier than I had planned.

I have a soft spot for the 211 Series, but I had other priorities today, so I did not ride this one.

A KiHa 110 diesel railcar - the first diesel railcar I saw in operation, actually.

Shinano Railway's SR1 series is largely based on JR's E129 series.

JR Central runs Limited Express services into Nagano.

The 383 series, used for those Limited Express services, still has analog destination displays - something else that is rare in Tokyo.

Onward to Nagano Dentetsu. My SUICA chip card is useless here, only paper tickets are accepted. This one contains the starting station (長野, Nagano) and the price category (300 yen) for my chosen destination.

Nagano Dentetsu's 8500 series is second-hand from Tokyu (where it was also classified as the 8500 series). Other Nagano Dentetsu vehicles include some former Odakyu "romancecars".

8500 Series interior - the colors are a bit outdated, but it is comfy.

8500 Series ceiling fan

8500 Series leaving Shinano-Yoshida station. From here, passengers can walk to the nearby Kitanagano station on the JR and Shinano Tetsudo lines.

I did not see many locomotives during my trip. This EH200 (E for electric, H for 8 axles) was a sight for sore eyes.

Groma Kolibri

Tue, 15 Oct 2024 21:37:45 GMT

Now that I've decided to reactivate my blog, I might as well start sharing inconsequential life updates on it.

I recently started collecting typewriters - I didn't really mean to, it just kind of happened, and now I own, like, eight.

I don't care a lot about mint condition or anything like that, I want to actually experience what it was like to use them, and my favourite piece is also among the more scratched-up ones.

It's a GDR-built Groma Kolibri, rebadged as a Neckersmann Brillant (sic.) Junior by a West German retailer. This brand name was used for a variety of rebadged import machines, with later models coming largely from Japan. The Kolibri is one of the flattest typewriters there are, its typing comfort is excellent, but it does tend to gather a lot of scrapes because the return lever will slam against the cover if you slightly misalign it after changing the ribbon.

To write on it feels amazing, though, far better than any other ultraportable I have tried so far, and the scuff marks mean I could slap a Hatsune Miku sticker on there without feeling guilty. It's a machine that is meant to be used, not a museum piece, after all.

This type of machine also featured in "The Lives of the Others", although the plot point about not being able to find a regular, black ribbon in the small size required is completely made up. This machine eats the same DIN ribbons that go into almost every post-WWII German-built typewriter.

BVE Train Simulator 5/6: The Big English Guide On How To Use It, And Why

Tue, 01 Dec 2020 17:17:47 GMT

Boso View Express, or BVE for short, is one of those train simulators that have been around for a very long time but never quite managed to establish themselves at the top of the food chain, at least not here in the west. But if you want to simulate Japanese railways, BVE is essentially the holy grail.

You can find a huge variety of routes and vehicles, all of them with appropriate train protection and signalling systems courtesy of a highly-flexible plugin interface, for absolutely no money at all, but there is a downside: Basically the entire community is based in Japan, communicates in Japanese, and works on Japanese computers - which makes it difficult to get into the sim, or even to get it working, if you are not able to read and understand at least a bit of Japanese. (Google Translate, while definitely useful, often chokes on technical jargon.)

This guide aims to help you install the sim and addons, understand principles of how Japanese railways generally are operated and how they differ from what we Westerners would expect, and also point you to some up-to-date, high-quality add-ons.

A note on OpenBVE

BVE has a complicated version history. Back when the most up-to-date version was BVE 4, and its author, mackoy, had not updated it in quite a while, an open-source clone called OpenBVE was created, and continues to be updated to this day. A while later, mackoy released BVE 5. As far as I can tell, OpenBVE has been adopted by pretty much all Western add-on creators, whereas BVE 5 was adopted by pretty much all Japanese add-on creators. This guide will mostly ignore OpenBVE because it is already well-documented in English.

BVE 5 add-ons do not work with OpenBVE. OpenBVE addons do not work with BVE 5.

BVE 5 or 6?

Simple answer: Both.

Long answer: BVE 6's main advantage over BVE 5 is that it is 64-bit compatible. However, BVE 6 can not play BVE 5 add-ons, and because BVE 6 only was released a couple of months ago, there is very little content for it so far.

Luckily, you can just install both of them. You can use different folders for the add-ons (for example C:\Users\\Documents\Bvets for BVE 5, and C:\Users\\Documents\Bvets6 for BVE 6) but this does not seem to be strictly necessary.

Currently, all add-ons mentioned in this article are for BVE 5.

Installation

Installing the sim itself is easy, just download and install your preferred version from the official website: http://bvets.net/en/download/

You also need an up-to-date .NET runtime, which should already be installed on your machine per default.

On the same website, you can also find two short official routes, the Keisei-Chiba line and the JR Uchibo line. Some other add-ons use files from those two, so you should definitely download and install them. The Uchibo line's download page is mostly in Japanese but all you need to do is click the big yellow button labelled "Download".

Installing add-ons

BVE add-ons usually come packaged as a ZIP archive.

You might be tempted to just open ZIP files with Windows Explorer, but in that case you will run into some problems with file names. While Windows itself stores file names in Unicode (meaning that non-Latin characters generally do not cause problems), ZIP files don't, and they do not specify the correct encoding in their metadata. This means that, if you create a ZIP archive on a Japanese computer and then open it on an English computer, your file names will be mangled - and BVE will then be unable to find the files it needs.

Not how file names are supposed to look like

There are two ways of overcoming this issue. One of them is " Locale Aware Unzip", a program I wrote myself for this exact problem. You can download and install it from here. Start the program, select the ZIP archive you wish to unpack, select an output directory (your Downloads directory is usually fine here), and select "Shift_JIS" as encoding.

The other way requires two pieces of software: The first is 7-zip, a powerful tool for opening archives. The other one is Locale Emulator. In order for this to work, you need to install the 32 bit version of 7-zip; Locale Emulator will not work with the 64 bit version.

Locale Emulator allows you to run individual programs with another system locale just by using the context menu. This is how to start 7-Zip in Japanese:

10 points if you spot the German Properly-rendered Japanese characters

The downside is that the entire user interface for 7-zip is now also in Japanese, but you could just open another 7-zip window without Locale Emulator, and then use that for orientation. In practice, all you need is the blue "-" button ("Extract"), and then the "OK" button in the next dialog.

Translator's Note: "OK" means "OK". "キャンセル" means "Cancel". You could probably infer that from context.

After unpacking the archive, you just need to copy the content to the appropriate folder. If the archive contained a "Scenarios" folder, you need to merge that with C:\Users\\Documents\BveTs\Scenarios (or wherever you are storing your add-on data). If the archive does not contain a "Scenarios" folder, you usually need to copy all the content of the archive into C:\Users\\Documents\BveTs\Scenarios. (The README file will tell you what to do but it is usually in Japanese only.)

Note that many route add-ons require you to download appropriate trains separately, and install them following the same procedure.

If an add-on is packaged as an EXE (or a self-extracting archive), you usually do not need to use Locale Emulator.

Start driving

Now that we have installed the simulator and a route add-on, we can open the sim, select a train and get going. Here, I'll be using the Keisei-Chiba line, one of the two "official" routes mentioned above, as an example.

Note that I am not using the default location for my addons. The Keisei-Chiba line just after starting the simulator

While the simulator itself is translated into English, most of the text specified by the vehicle and / or route, like the HUD parts in the lower left corner and the timetable in the upper right corner, are often in Japanese. Here are a couple of useful words and characters:

Reverser: 前 (forwards) - 切 (neutral) - 後 (backwards)

Throttle: 切 (off / neutral) - ノッチ１ (notch 1)

Brake: ゆるめ or ユルメ (released) - 非常 or 非常制動 (emergency brake)

Luckily, on the latter two, most vehicles just use P1, P2, ... for the power throttle and B1, B2, ... for the brake lever.

At the top of the window, there are instructions on what to do, which you can use to familiarize yourself with the key bindings. For reference, the ones you need to know are:

Q - A - Z for the power lever or combined power/brake lever. Q goes down a notch (decrease power or increase brake), Z goes up a notch (increase power or decrease brake), and A moves one notch towards the neutral position.

Comma and Period for the brake. Comma releases the brake by one notch, period applies one more notch.

Up-Arrow and Down-Arrow for the Reverser (up for "forward", down for "backward"). Note that, in order to switch the direction you have to press the appropriate button twice - the first press only gets you into neutral position.

On the Keisei-Chiba line, the train guard will notify you with two beeps once you're allowed to leave. On other routes, this might be a single beep, one or two chimes, or there may be one-man operation so you may depart as soon as the door light (usually green) turns on and the HUD assistant (top of the screen) tells you to depart.

When it is time to stop at the next station, the bar on the right side of the window shows you the stopping position on a +/- 10 meter scale. When the green diamond is right on the center line, you are at the perfect stop position. While the diamond still is green, your stopping position is correct. When it is yellow, you are not in a correct stopping position and you need to move the train in the appropriate direction.

Doors are generally not operated by the driver in BVE.

You can hide all the HUD assistants, by the way, but I recommend you leave them on at least for a while. They are very helpful.

Notes on DMUs and railcars

Many diesel vehicles have a semi-manual gearbox, requiring you two switch between a low gear (変) and a high gear (直). You can switch between them with PageUp (towards high gear) and PageDown (towards low gear). The three gears are usually arranged like this:

High gear (直) - Neutral (中) - Low gear (変)

This means you need to press PageUp twice when shifting from low gear to high gear.

There are usually some indicators in the cab showing the kanji listed above. Note that the clutch is operated automatically, and whenever you are standing still or coasting, the indicator for neutral gear (中) will be shown regardless of which gear you have actually selected.

Also, many railcars (and some locos) do not have a stepped / self-lapping brake valve. On these vehicles, you will generally find four notches on the brake lever:

Release (弛め込め) - Lap (重なり) - Apply (常用制動) - Emergency (非常制動)

You will be familiar with this setup if you have driven any of the early British railcars in Diesel Railcar Simulator, Train Simulator 20XX or Train Sim World. If you aren't, here's the gist of it:

While the lever is in the "Release" position, air is gradually pumped into the brake pipe until the brake is fully released.
While the lever is in the "Lap" position, pressure in the brake pipe is kept constant, keeping the brake at a similar level. (This does not mean the braking force will be constant!)
While the lever is in the "Apply" position, air is gradually moved out of the brake pipe, applying more and more braking force.
The "Emergency" position should be fairly obvious - all air is released out of the brake pipe almost immediately in order to stop as fast as possible.

When approaching a stop or a signal, you move the brake to the "Apply" position until you've reached an appropriate pressure in the brake pipe, then move it to the "Lap" position. From there on, you can regulate the brake by moving it to "Release" or "Apply" for a bit, then going back to the "Lap" position. While you're coasting or accelerating, the brake lever should be in "Release".

When leaving a stop, you should keep an eye on the brake pressure gauges, as the brakes will take a bit to fully release and applying power before the brake is released will increase wear and tear on the braking system and gearbox.

Japanese vehicles generally operate at a brake pipe pressure of 5 bar / 500 hPa.

Reading the timetable

In this timetable, you might suspect that you only need to stop at the last stop (Chiba / 千葉) but you would be wrong. While the two other stops (Nishi-Nobuto and Shin-Chiba) do not have a set arrival and departure time, you are still required to stop! When you may pass a stop, it is marked with an arrow, as in this example from the Hankyū Takarazuka Line.

By the way, the numbers indicate recommended speed for the respective section. You'll only see this on a small handful of scenarios.

Basics of Japanese railway signals

Most Japanese routes use a signalling system with five different aspects, which always works more or less the same. Some other routes use a variety of cab signalling systems which we will get to in a later section.

The Keisei-Chiba line is an example of a route with regular signals.

This section is not meant to be exhaustive, as the details vary a lot between operators, and even between individual routes. It's intended as an overview; you can figure out the rest, and having some basic knowledge will also help you figure out the read-me files / manuals of individual add-ons after they've been mangled by Google Translate. If you want to read more, this Wikipedia article is a good start. If you know more in-depth sources, I'd be interested of hearing about them in the comments.

The five signal aspects in common use are shown in this handy image:

Image courtesy of Wikipedia user Tam0031 (License: CC-BY-SA 3.0)

All you really need to care about are the colors of the lights - there is no difference between the five different variants of the "proceed" aspect. They all mean you may proceed.

Side note: Google Translate often describes the green lights as "blue", because the Japanese language uses 青い to describe both of these colors.

The yellow-green, yellow and yellow-yellow aspects all require you to reduce your speed, but unfortunately the exact speed limits vary between lines. For example, on the Hankyū lines, yellow-green equals 65 km/h, yellow equals 45 km/h, and yellow-yellow equals 25 km/h. After a yellow or yellow-yellow signal you also have to expect the next signal to show "stop".

There is (usually) no advance warning for yellow-green or yellow signals, so you have to be watchful. Most Japanese trains have strong brakes, and the maximum speeds generally are very low, so this isn't a problem, even though such operating principles are generally restricted to subways in many other countries. However, when visibility is poor, there may be an additional repeater signal:

Image courtesy of Wikipedia user "Majo statt Senf" (License: CC0)

If the repeater shows a diagonal line, the next signal will show green-yellow, yellow or yellow-yellow. The horizontal line means the next signal shows "stop" and the vertical line means the next signal is clear.

Speed limits are generally displayed as a sign with a number on it - these look different depending on the operator, but are generally self-explanatory. Sometimes there are two or even more different limits for different types of trains, with local trains having a limit of 5 to 15 km/h lower than express trains.

When there is a speed limit on the diverging branch of a switch, it is generally marked with a sign next to that switch - exactly how this is done also varies depending on the route but it's often marked with an arrow pointing in the direction of the switch.

One important point is that you do not get a clear advance warning for those speed limits. Signals in a station only tell you which route you will take, and you need to know (or be told by the HUD) what the appropriate speed limit is. There are a variety of ways in which this information can be conveyed.

Approaching Narita: There are multiple signals. Each one of them represents a different route. Depending on which route is set, only one of them shows a "proceed" aspect - in this case, the second from the right. Generally, higher signals represent routes with higher speeds, and a signal on the right side represents a route to the right side (and vice versa). (Sobu & Narita Line) The two white dots under the signal indicate we will go straight ahead. A single white dot would indicate a route in the corresponding direction. Similar indicators that show an arrow on a (very rough) dot-matrix also exist. (Kintetsu Nara Line) Approaching Osaka-Umeda: The number below the signal tells us we're going to track 4. (Hankyu Lines)

Automatic Train Stop (ATS)

Most routes with conventional signalling feature some kind of train protection system, which will intervene if you go past a red signal, exceed a speed limit, approach a red signal too fast or do other unsafe things. Just how much control those systems have, and how exactly they operate, varies between operators, routes and vehicles. Some variants are:

ATS-S: The simplest variant, used on many low-traffic routes. When you're approaching a red signal, a loud bell will ring, at which point you need to immediately apply the brakes and acknowledge the warning (with SPACE or DELETE, depending on the vehicle). A chime will continue to ring out, so you don't forget about the signal. Once you've stopped in front of the signal, you can stop that chime with INSERT.
ATS-P (Pattern): Used on many JR routes. The system knows about speed limits and signal states, and will intervene if you go too fast or approach a signal / speed threshold with too much confidence. First, you'll hear a warning chime, and then the emergency brakes will be applied until you've slowed down sufficiently. Note that you are not supposed to rely on this system, it does not necessarily know every speed limit, and it is only intended as a security layer which intervenes in case of an operator mistake.
Other variants, like the ones used by Hankyū and Kintetsu, have a couple of speed thresholds (in the case of Kintetsu, 95km/h, 65km/h, 45km/h and 30km/h). When approaching a signal showing "stop" or a restricting aspect, these thresholds will kick in at certain points before the signal, so you need to be careful about braking in time.

If you get forcibly stopped by a train protection system, in many cases you need to set the reverser to neutral, apply the emergency brake (key "1"), and then press HOME (or another key depending on the exact vehicle - usually stated in the README or manual).

Don't forget that these systems often use balises for communication, meaning that the train only gets information about upcoming signals when it passes certain points. Thus, when a signal ahead switches to a less restrictive aspect (e. g. from "stop" to "clear"), the ATS might still enforce a braking curve until you pass the next balise, and the train receives information that the signal is no longer showing "stop".

Automatic Train Control (ATC)

On more important routes (ranging from the Shinkansen to the Tokyo Monorail), Automatic Train Control is installed. There are several different systems sharing that designation but in general they operate on similar principles:

A marker next to the speedometer will show the current maximum speed.
When you pass a section marker (a "virtual signal", if you will), that marker may be lowered to reduced speed and the train will automatically brake down. Before e. g. a tight curve, this will happen soon enough that the train will reach the appropriate reduced speed before it reaches the curve, usually with lots of room to spare.

ATC in action (Tōkyū Tōyoko Line)

When there is another train ahead of you, the speed limit will be gradually reduced several sections earlier, and will then eventually go down to 0 (or a red light shown next to the speedometer), indicating you need to stop before the next section marker. On some routes you need to brake down to 0 manually at the appropriate point, while obeying speed limits imposed by the Overrun Protection (ORP). For example, on the Tōkyū Tōyoko line, a "ORP 20km/h" sign and a "ORP 10km/h" sign will show shortly before the section marker, and if you are above the indicated speed, the ATC will very suddenly bring your train to a halt.

ORP 10km/h marker coming up, on the ground between the rails. Our ATC is showing a clear aspect (green light) so the ORP is not active, and we do not have to obey the 10km/h limit. (Tōkyū Tōyoko Line)

ATC is generally fairly intuitive and easy to operate and you will quickly get the hang of it.

Recommended routes & Add-Ons

Many other add-ons depend on Rock_On's JR vehicle package. I strongly recommend you install it before you install anything else. Download it here.

Whenever you're on a download page and feel lost, just look for a button or link saying ダウンロード (download).

Tōkyō Monorail

Tōkyō Monorail (東京モノレール) is operated by JR East and connects Haneda airport to Hamamatsuchō (浜松町) where interchange to several important JR lines is possible. The route is represented here in its entirety.

You can drive a local train (普通), section express (区間快速, operates as a local train on some parts of the route and as an express on others) or an express (快速, stopping only at Hamamatsucho and Haneda's terminals). This add-on represents two different eras, one from before the opening of Haneda International Terminal (with the building site for the new Monorail station visible) and one from after (with the monorail now taking a slightly different route in order to serve the new terminal).

Download the route here (click the link labelled "ダウンロード).

Download the appropriate vehicles here: 1000 Series and 10000 Series

Hiroshima Dentetsu Miyajima Line

Hiroshima Dentetsu (Hiroden) operates Hiroshima's extensive tram network, although the route represented in this addon is actually classified as a railway. For much of the run, this line is more-or-less parallel to the San'yo line of JR West.

You will spend a lot of time waiting for passengers to board on some stations, making it very hard (or even impossible) to follow the timetable. Expect to be delayed by ~3 minutes at the end.

Download the route here (click the link labelled "ダウンロード).

Download the appropriate vehicles here: 3100 Series and 3950 Series

Kintetsu Nara Line & Ōsaka Line

Two very good lines from Japan's biggest private railway operator, Kintetsu. The Nara Line (not to be confused with the JR line of the same name) connects Nara to Ōsaka-Namba, featuring an impressive descent into the city of Ōsaka from a mountain range. The Ōsaka line is currently limited to the section from Yamato-Yagi to Aoyamachō and also features some very steep ramps.

The following download links use Google Translate because the site is fairly hard to navigate otherwise.

Download the Ōsaka line here

Download the Nara line here

Download the 9020 Series train here

You can also find some helpful information on how to operate Kintetsu's ATS and other things on the above website.

Download a variety of Kintetsu trains by Code-T here

Tōkyū Tōyoko Line / Minatomirai Line

This very busy line connects Shibuya station in Tōkyō with Yokohama, and with the Minatomirai ("Harbor of the Future") district. Although this line is among the oldest add-ons mentioned in this list, it is still fairly impressive. Several other companies share this line with Tōkyū, and Tōkyū's trains also usually continue onto the Tōkyō Metro Fukotoshin Line at Shibuya, although only Tōkyū's own 5050 Series is actually driveable in this add-on.

Several stations feature platform-edge doors, requiring you to stop very precisely. This is made easier by the train's excellent braking system but still requires a bit of finesse and lots of focus to do consistently. I believe that in real life, TASC is installed on this route, automating those precise stops.

Important: You need to follow correct startup procedure! While the reverser is neutral and the emergency brake is applied, press "7" (not on numpad!) on the keyboard. A light labelled 東急 (Tōkyū) at the bottom of the panel will turn on. Only then, put the reverser in forward and release the brake. A bell will ring for a few seconds while the ATC initializes, and then the ATC indicators should become active (red or green light, plus triangular marker next to speedometer).

Download here (Link using Google Translate). 4 packages.

Hankyū Lines

This add-on represents Hankyū's three principal lines, the Kobe Line, Kyōto Line and Takarazuka Line, plus two branches, the Senri Line and Arashiyama Line, all in their entirety.

This network connects the three principal cities of the Keihanshin region, Kobe, Ōsaka and Kyōto, and will keep you busy with a variety of local and express trains for quite a while. Of particular note is the six-track section connecting Jūsō station with Ōsaka-Umeda, with the Kobe, Kyōto and Takarazuka Lines all running in parallel on the approach to their terminus. The Kyōto Line also runs parallel to the Tōkaidō Shinkansen for a bit, and you might be overtaken by a high-speed train.

The Senri line connects directly to the Ōsaka subway, and subway trains often continue on the Senri line. In fact, you can drive a subway service on this route yourself.

Download here. Google Translate does not work on this site! Scroll down to the section labelled "BVE5阪急線・リニューアル改訂版 Ver3.3 (2019.2.16)" (at time of writing, might change in the future) and click the button labelled "ダウンロード". Then, go to all the pages in the left sidebar that start with "阪急" (Hankyū), and download everything you can find on them (labelled "ダウンロード" as well), and the Osaka Metro 66 Series.

Also download these vehicles:

Series 9300 (again, click the link labelled "ダウンロード")
Series 5300, 6300, 7300 (two separate files)
Series 3300 (click the link to 1drv.ms, all the way at the bottom)

If you forget (or can't find) one of these vehicles, at least the scenarios with other trains should still work fine.

JR Sōbu / Narita Line

This addon contains the Sōbu and Narita Lines' section from Chiba to Sawara - a double-tracked main line for the first 20-ish kilometers, which then continues as a somewhat slower single-track line. There's also the Narita Airport Line, connecting Narita Airport to Narita Station, running in parallel to Keisei's Narita Airport Line, which is in a different gauge, and the Kashima line. In short, it's a network of some routes that feel very distinct from one another, with a variety of services. An English version is available but doesn't get updated as often as the Japanese version, apparently.

Download the route here (JP, current version 5.9.1) or here (EN, current version 5.9.1). Also check the "Driving Guidance" tab for an in-depth explanation on the signalling system and the "Introduction" tab for a map. Hint: Pay very close attention to the Hazard Warning Indicators!

No comprehensive list of vehicles because I can't find all of them myself, but here are the ones I can:

Rock_On's train pack (see at beginning of section) is required.

A note on driving the Kashima Rinkai Tetsudō 6000 Series: When starting this vehicle, you need to put the reverser forward, then back in neutral, and then forward again. Only after that, the direction indicator on the panel (up arrow) will light up. If you do not do this, you will not be able to move the vehicle. Also read the section on operating railcars in this article.

If you happen to stall the vehicle, put the gear and reverser in neutral, open the throttle to P5, then repeatedly press the "5" key (not on numpad!) repeatedly. Then, close the throttle, put the reverser forward, the gear in low gear, and open the throttle again to proceed.

Notes on "missing" add-ons

This article will be amended in the future with additional add-ons, whenever I find new add-ons that are easy enough to install and worth the effort. There are several add-ons I have omitted, because a) they are very small, b) they require high effort to install (sadly, at the moment this category includes the excellent JR Kobe line) or c) are out-of-date or otherwise of very low visual quality. There are also most likely some very good add-ons which I simply do not know of.

Final notes

This guide is intended to be helpful, but I cannot guarantee its accuracy and I do not claim it is complete. If any info in this is out-of-date, especially if any of the links are broken, please comment and I will try to fix it.

I'd like to give a shout-out to Austin Huang, who wrote a similar guide, and also describes how to get BVE 5 running on a Mac.

All the add-ons mentioned and / or shown in screenshots are copyright of their respective authors. All Screenshots in this article were made by me.

I realize that it would be easier for you, the reader, if I directly linked to the add-on files, rather than the authors' websites. However, that would be both incredibly rude and in violation of copyright.

Any corrections or information on out-of-date information is welcome in the comments, as are links to add-ons not contained in the list.

The information in this guide is exclusively intended for the purposes of simulation; it is not to be used for the purposes of operating trains in real life.

Update history

2022-03-03: Edited the section "Installing add-ons" to reference my program "Locale Aware Unzip" as an alternative to Locale Emulator.

2020-12-11: Added section on diesel railcars and non-self-lapping brake valves, and some notes on the KRT 6000 in the Sōbu / Narita line section.

Tumblr of the Day: Trains In Games

Sat, 11 Mar 2017 22:17:39 GMT

Just giving a quick shout-out to this Tumblr, which combines a thing I like with a thing I like: Trains In Games