Yesterday was strange in that almost everything that I wanted to post here on the blog had something to do with trains. I ride trains everyday here in Japan – it is my primary form of transportation and I really enjoy not having a driver’s license (and not needing one), especially coming from the land of the automobile.
Yesterday afternoon when I arrived at my local train station (JR Okubo) I noticed a train waiting there that I had never seen before. JR Okubo is kind of a small to medium sized train station – there are four platforms for loading and unloading passengers. The smallest stations only have one platform for each direction, with large stations like Osaka or Kyoto having more than thirty. At Okubo there is a little spur of track that is apart from the main line, and very rarely JR will put a train there temporarily to get it out of the way of the heavier train traffic. It is a rare occasion though, since the next station to the east has a railyard with plenty of space.
The trains that run on the JR line are for the most part pretty much the same. They run back and forth across the Kansai area, and everyone is very familiar with them. But there is a type of person in Japan – call them train nerds – who enjoy taking pictures of trains and are trying to “collect” pictures of as many trains and train lines as possible. Across Japan trains are an integral part of the culture, and each part of Japan has many different types of local trains, and several different train companies, each with different kinds of trains for different routes. That means a lot of trains to “collect” and the train nerds love it.
You can sometimes see train nerds camped out at the end of a platform with tripods and camera equipment, waiting for a train to come in to take a perfect picture. Some of these guys travel all over Japan in search of rare trains to photograph in a harmless but somewhat odd (to me) hobby.
Anyway, when a new train is sitting at Okubo station it didn’t take long for some train nerds to show up and try to get some pictures. The train itself wasn’t so exciting – it appeared to be a train used for teaching new drivers (I didn’t want to use the word training), and the style was more the tourist style than the commuter style.
As I was walking down the steps I was surprised as a train nerd coming running down behind me, gently pushed me out of the way and got to the platform in order to snap some photos. It was that exciting. A few minutes later the train left and headed west, so I guess it was good that the guy made it in time to get the shots.
Several minutes later a cargo train came rolling by on the way to Osaka, but this cargo train was covered in fresh white snow. There were cargo containers on board, and even these were topped with a thick layer of the white stuff. Probably 50% of the load was snow. It was the first time I had seen anything like that, and it was quite beautiful rolling by in the sunny but cold weather in Okubo.
Two minutes later my train came in. I sat inside the warm car, opened a book and was shuttling off to Kobe for work.
