I don't collect them, per say, but I do have a few. Forgive me, I have Thomas the tank with Annie and Clarabell with 2 wagons. The attachment is a little commuter called the Furano Express. It is a little beauty.:tb-rolleyes::thumbs_up: They both run very nicely.
I've got the Kato version of the Furano Express but in the 'ANA Big Sneaker' scheme. I'm not sure of the story behind it's career as the 'Big Sneaker', but as the Furano Express the train runs between Sapporo and the ski resort town of Furano on Hokkaido, or at least it did, in Feb '06 I saw the train parked in the yard at Hakodate, way off it's regular route, but it may have been just stored there until the tourist season or being used for charter work off season. The train, along with three or four other trains, was built at JR Hokkaido's Naebo shops in Sapporo in 1986 using old railcars stripped down to the underframes as a base. The photos attached are from when I rode the train from Furano to Sapporo in 1994. The main thing I remember was that during the trip a girl came through the train selling ice cream as is not unusual in Japan, but the flavours available were corn and potato.:tb-wacky:
Vicky56 - I also have the Furano Express but the Tomix version. I converted it to DCC but has it a pain in the neck to do. Are you running you train DC or DCC? And Vicky56 Welcome to the Trainboard. Westfalen - you get to take some amazing trips! How was traveling in the Furano Express? I like the wide view windows, it reminds me of the Super View Odoriko train.
I've done seven trips to Japan since 1990, in 90, 94, 96, 97, 98 and twice in 2006, I guess its a bit easier since its just under eight hours flight from here, once you get there its a lot cheaper and easier to get around than most people think and it's certainly a railfan's paradise. The Furano Express trip was during a railfan tour in 1994, the leader of the tour was going to take the newer 'North Rainbow', the other train in the pictures below, but I talked him into the Furano Express because I had a model of it. For some reason, possibly the weather that day, everyone else taking the newer train or the direction we were going into Sapporo when most people were leaving town for the weekend, there were only about a dozen passengers on the train besides us and we could sit anywhere we liked. The wide view windows do give a good view, but like the Super View Odoriko there are seats up front looking out over the engineers head where I migrated to for most of the trip. There was a Japanese railfan sitting beside me most of the way calling out the names of the other trains we passed. I rode on the Super View Odoriko in 1990 when it had only been in service a week but I can't lay my hands on the disc of scanned photos of the trip at the moment, that was back in pre digital days, but I found a shot from the '94 trip.
Westfalen - Since you have done a lot of traveling on the Japanese rail system, which would you say was you favorite trip and why? Also do you have a favorite Japanese prototype? Thanks for posting your photos of the Japanese prototypes, I'm really enjoy viewing them.
I think the most exciting trip was my first in 1990 because of the excitement of seeing places I'd never been before and realising for the first time how much more there was in Japan than big cities and bullet trains. My favorite trip I'd have to say was spending a week in Hokkaido in the winter in Feb '06, I've never seen so much snow and yet the trains still ran dead on time. Hard to pick a favorite prototype, there's just too much to choose from. However if I had to pick two I'd go for the 100 series shinkansen, I just like the look of them and think they have more style than the more recent designs, although the original 0 series are the ones that, to me, say Japan. Overall choice, and one I've always liked, is the C11 2-6-4 tank loco, I think they are a nice looking steam loco, I've ridden behind them on the Oigawa Railway and one of JR Hokkaido's two restored examples. Although the thrill of riding them or standing on a station platform as one flashes past on the through tracks at top speed is always a thrill, the shinkansen don't get me as excited as some, I see them more as a quick and easy way to get from point A to point B to see the really interesting stuff that's been slowly dissappearing since my first visit, like 1920's style interurban lines or branchlines through the countryside and mountains that see only a couple of trains a day. You can start your day on a crowded commuter train in morning rush hour in Tokyo and end up 500 miles away on a train in the middle of nowhere where you're the only passenger and be back in time for dinner.
I enjoyed reading your description of your trips. You always think of Japan as those scenes where conductors and pushing in the passengers in order to get everybody to work on time So it is doubly interesting in how you describe that you can start your day in a crowd an ending up in solitude. Riding on a bullet train was probably one of the most comfortable trips I ever took. Enough can't be said about the service, where in the middle of your trip a person comes around offering drinks, sandwiches, etc., and the trains is immaculate. What I do find interesting is that for the size of Japan, there is a wide variety of prototypes.
Land of CONTRASTS I think my title says it all, guys. Japan is such a crowded little nation; a population as big as noontime New York City, Los Angeles, AND Rome, jammed into a space less than California, with less arable land; they had a choice to either develop EFFICIENT transportation or disintegrate. The same choice came in relation to manners; Japan has one of the most polite societies on Earth (a LOT more so than here in the US, I have to - and hate to - admit). There are some drawbacks to their society, but they aren't pertinent to this discussion, and I'm not goingto insert them here unless you guys want to get into it. All I'm going to say here is that their railroads run ON TIME, are CLEAN, and have probably the BEST SAFETY RECORD anywhere - and all this in Earthquake Central! Now THAT is ENGINEERING! Now if Kato, or Tomix, or Micro Ace would just release an N-scale Hogwarts Express...! Jim
Thank you Bernard for your welcome. I don't pop in very often but I do try. I'm a die hard DC person. I enjoy the wiring aspect of my layout and I would rather spend my money on some more stock than on DCC chips.
I know Tomix does the "Thomas the Tank Engine" sets but doesn't Bachmann make an HO version of the Hogwarts Express already? They might have bought the rights from JK Rawlings.
A few observations about Japanese prototype N Scale equipment.... Steam locomotives: Most Japanese steam runs on meter gauge track... and the scale of the "N Gauge" models is around 1/150. This works out so that the models are scaled up to about North American N Scale size. However, there are some problems using Japanese prototypes for North American outline locomotives. Generally, the motors are in the cab and fill it to the sides, locking in the position of the cab. The cabs are further back and lower than many of our prototypes. Also, most have British/Continental style steam chests which are quite different from ours with the rounded tops and external delivery pipes. Many JNR prototypes use disk style rather than the more common spoked drivers and different-looking valve gear frames. These problems and their solutions were outlined in an old series on kitbashing steam locomotives by Zen Master Greg Scott (of GHQ) in N Scale Magazine. Kato, Tomix, and Micro-Ace releases are, like ours are here, single produciton runs and are subject to being sold out in Japan, much less there being product available for export. I don't think the Japanese companies give much thought beyond their domestic market so getting any one item outside of Japan is dicey. I found the Micro-Ace line to be upgraded copies of older Kato mechanisms. The newest Kato mechanisms (C62, 9600) are more like the Daylight and USRA Mikado respectively, and are much more complicated. Note that the C62 has been completely reworked and is no longer the same overall size as the Con-Cor NYC J3a Hudson, so the new version cannot be used as a drive for the GHQ Hiawatha F7 as it is now the size of a small Pacific and has much smaller drivers. Charlie Vlk
What you say is correct, as usual, but a slight correction, the 'standard' gauge in Japan is 3ft 6in or 1067mm same as here in Queensland. The first Japanese railway was built by the British hence the British 'colonial gauge' rather than the metre gauge used in other Asian countries backed by the metric using Europeans, except Indonesia which for some reason is 3ft 6in and Taiwan where the railways were built by the Japanese, but then British India had metre gauge. BTW just a bit of bragging, we had the first 3ft 6in mainline railway in the world, nine years before Japan.
Back to the original theme of Tomix trains, here's an example of what was possibly as far as you could get from a Shinkansen in the '90s and still be in Japan, the Nanbu Jyukan Railway four wheel railcars and one of the Tomix models (you get a set of two powered cars). I first saw the real cars in an ad for a video in Japan Railfan magazine picked up on a previous trip but it was all in Japanese. I compared the characters for a couple of placenames with ones in the JR timetable and found the line ran from Noheji on JR's Tohoku Mainline in the far north of Honshu. I then decided I had to 'do' the line when I went for a solo visit to Japan in 1996. I was staying in Ikebukero in Tokyo and worked out that if I caught the first commuter train in the morning north to Omiya to connect with the day's first northbound Shinkansen to Morioka, then 3'6" gauge Ltd Express further north, I could do a round trip on the Nanbu Jyukan and get in an electric interurban line that ran inland from Misawa on the way north as well. I was able to get the last southbound Shinkansen from Morioka and just got home before the commuter trains stopped running for the night after a trip of about 750km each way. It was quite a contrast riding the Nanbu Jyukan then a brand new double deck MAX Shinkansen on the way back to Tokyo. Sadly you can't do this anymore, when I passed through Noheji on another trip nine months later the Nanbu Jyukan's station was boarded up and abandoned, the fact that the only other passengers besides me were two Japanese railfans tipped me off that the line was running on borrowed time.
