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Photopost: Train geek voyage FAIL
Shinsuke and I had planned today to be a trip out to Aizu-Wakamatsu via the Tadami line, which involved getting up at 4:30am and taking trains through a bunch of crazy mountainous areas of Gunma and Niigata and such, to eventually make a big loop through the northern half of Kanto.
I got 3 hours of sleep and he got 1.5 hours of sleep, and we met up on the first Takasaki-bound train of the morning. He slept for half of the way, but I was awake for all of it. I made him get up to see the sunrise, at any rate.
524 Akabane -> 655 Takasaki
710 Takasaki -> 813 Minakami
821 Minakami -> 825 Yubiso
Everything up to this point was fairly standard, we rode trains, we talked, we slept, we saw beautiful mountains and debated about which one was which, etc. We ran to the train transfers at Takasaki and Minakami because there were a TON of snowboarders and skiiers also taking the same route out towards Niigata, and we wanted seats on the trains.
Minakami, btw, is 水上, which I kept reading as "Mizukami".
Anyway, so Yubiso is a train station in the middle of a tunnel. Well, the outgoing platform is in a tunnel, anyway. The incoming platform is above land, and the entire station is unmanned and in the middle of fucking nowhere, with very little else there except, apparently a campground, an onsen, and a post office. So we took photos of the station and the tunnel and so on, and eventually holed up in the "waiting room" there to eat donuts for a bit and wait.
Went down to get a bus from Yubiso to Doai. An old couple was also waiting for the bus. They apparently had stayed at the onsen and were doing some kind of tour of the mountains of this area, something like that. They had come from Kyushu. Shin ended up talking to the lady a bunch, about Mt. Aso and other parts of Kyushu. The funny part was, I could understand everything they were saying, I just didn't know how to respond, so when he translated for me I was like (in Japanese) "Nono, I get it, I just didn't know what to say. Smoke all the way to Hokkaido when it erupted? That's unbelievable!" The lady was all like "OMG you speak Japanese! What are you two doing out here anyway?" and Shin's like "Uhh... we're enjoying being train nerds."
We rode the bus with them a bit once it showed up (it drove past us and we had to wave it down!) but we were only going one station, to Doai, which is ANOTHER tunnel station. The upper track, going incoming towards Takasaki, goes in a big loop and crosses itself in order to go down a big hill, but the lower track just goes through a new tunnel, which was dug in order to not have to go up and down the damn hill. But unlike Yubiso, there is a HUGE staircase from the upper platform to the lower platform -- it's great, you go across a bridge over a river, and the bridge feeds you right into the side of a mountain, where there's a big sign in the other direction explaining "This is Japan's #1 Mole Station. You have gone up 462 steps to arrive at this point, but there are still some more! Good job! Good luck!" And then there is literally just a HUGE FUCKING STAIRCASE IN A HUGE FUCKING TUNNEL going down. It doesn't take so long to go down, but at the bottom they warn you, "It's gonna take you at least 10 minutes to get up this thing."
They actually number the steps in intervals, and there's a bench around #240 or so, so I took a photo of it. This ended up having us chat about 15-212 and 18-240 for the rest of the way down. ("Which 240 did YOU mean?!")
There were two other people down there also taking photos of the tunnel and whatnot, though. Eventually the train showed up and we were on our merry way towards Koide... except...
905 Yubiso -> 910 Doai (bus)
956 Doai -> 1021 Echigo-Yuzawa
...Shin's camera ran out of battery in Doai. So he wanted to buy a new battery. That combined with a desire to get food and whatnot, when we opened my train schedule book and looked through it, we noticed there was a weekends train from Echigo-Yuzawa that ran at 11:19, so we could stop there for a while instead, since Shin said Koide was a very inaka town but EY is a big ski resort and train hub for heading to Hokuriku and so on.
And sure enough, we found convenience stores and food and everything near or in the station. We ended up getting some kind of pork katsudon thing for lunch, went shopping a little but didn't buy anything, and then went to our next train. Where again, I looked at cool snowy mountains, and Shin kept falling asleep.
1119 Echigo-Yuzawa -> 1202 Koide
And here, unfortunately, is where the adventure turned sour.
We should have been taking the Tadami train from Koide at 13:17, to 17:18 at Aizu-Wakamatsu. That was our entire purpose for this trip -- Shin said it was a beautiful line to take in the winter and see the lovely snowy countryside. Keep in mind this line runs in entirety all of THREE TIMES PER DAY each way, and has maybe 9 cars per day each way, but mostly only running for a few stations on either end, to hook school kids and old people up with bigger better trains at either end.
What we didn't know at the time was that a huge heavy nasty snowfall had kind of overrun the tracks somewhere near Tadami city itself -- in the 5 or so hours since a train had last passed through the area.
So Shin and I went walking into Koide town to waste an hour. There were lots of cute little shops on the town's main drag, but nobody actually walking around town, which was kind of freaky. We went a few blocks to a supermarket, and Shin told me last time he did this route he stopped in there for a bento. (They had sushi bento for 298 yen, which is dirt cheap.) This time we just got candy and walked back to the station, talking about the ramifications of Japan's youth tending to all desert the countryside and want to move to Tokyo.
We got ready to get on the train, and hear the announcement,
"Due to snow, the Tadami train is being delayed until 15:30."
And we're both like, "WTF?!"
Shin goes up and has an animated chat with the stationmaster, and finds out the details about the stations being shut down and so on and so forth. And he comes back and tells me, and we're both like "Dude, if it's delayed 2 hours, we can't stick to our original schedule without being stranded..." and we look through the train book trying to figure out how feasible it is, maybe taking a shinkansen. In the meantime, another Joetsu train arrives and a ton of tourists get off and rush to the Tadami train and take all the seats. And ALSO another train comes in and leaves to return to Echigo-Yuzawa.
Then there's another announcement: "The train will depart at 13:17 as scheduled. But we make no guarantees about when or if you will arrive ANYWHERE."
So we're doubly WTF. Shin has another chat with the stationmaster.
We get on the train, but after 5 minutes of discussing the situation, Shin says he recommends we turn around and go back. I'm a little sad about it, and debating whether I want to spend 5000 yen for a shinkansen or what... but we both notice the skies are getting really dark and the snow is getting heavier. We realize that we can still make it home if the train is up to about an hour behind schedule, but more than that and we're gonna be in trouble.
So, ugh, we end up getting off the train. It pulls out. I immediately feel super-sad. PLUS we have to wait another hour for the next Joetsu train back to civilization :(
Shin and I went to the waiting room to pass the time, chat a bit, and then both fell asleep for about 45 minutes before starting our journey back to Takasaki and so on. We spent most of the next two train segments telling riddles and stories, and Shin got out his laptop and surfed some train geek sites to see if there was any news about the Tadami line (we eventually learn it was delayed for an hour and a half, but we never find out if it landed safely.)
We also determined that the Tadami line implements a really primitive mutex, given that there's only one line and occasionally trains have to travel both ways at the same time. Shin said there's no central tower connecting it, but instead, the conductors give and take special tablets to/from stationmasters to let them know they're travelling on a specific track segment, so if a train arrives at a station and the tablet isn't available, that means someone else is on the segment, and you need to wait for them to release their lock on the track until you can use it.
1422 Koide -> 1543 Minakami
1548 Minakami -> 1651 Takasaki
We get out and walk around for a little while in Takasaki... basically long enough to eat taiyaki and for Shin to buy some kind of special bento from the Yokokawa station or something like that. We admire the bazillion Daruma all over the place, it must be a Gunma thing. Then we hop on another train.
1723 Takasaki -> 1852 Akabane
Shin sleeps through about half of this too, before he actually starts snoring so I wake him up and make him talk to me. I suggest we go do something like videogames or dinner, but he decides he'd rather go home and sleep. I point out that we should have still been on a train to Koriyama at this point, but he's just looking really zonked. He promises he'll take me to the train museum in Omiya when I get back to Japan, apologizes again, and we say goodbye and I step off the train as he continues to Ueno to go home.
I get dinner at Yokado and go home alone and sad and cold. The end.
Here are some photos:
Seriously, the inaka is beautiful.
View crossing over Minakami station.
Yubiso, one of the crazy tunnel stations.
Outside Yubiso on the top platform. LOTS of snow. I'm 5'7", for reference.
Good thing Shinsuke knew where the bus stop is or we'd never have found it.
At Doai. This is the bridge you cross over to get into the hole in the mountain to descend into the darkness of Doai's Lower Platform.
Shin also marvels at the height of the snow... and he's a little taller than I am!
It looks like a ski lodge, but it's a (mostly-deserted) train station.
"Good job climbin' them 462 stairs! Now you still gotta walk some and go up a bit more to get to the station exit... good luck!"
Me, at the top of the huge descent into darkness.
From the bottom of the stairs. Yikes.
The train arrives at Doai! Hooray!
Weird-ass statues at Echigo-Yuzawa. Supposedly you were supposed to pretend to be drunk and pose with them.
The snowplow train at Koide.
Koide's main drag, at 12pm on a Saturday afternoon. Serious ghost town thing going on here.
But at least they have a tardis. I guess that's how they get the fuck out of the countryside when the trains shut down due to snow.
But this was some of the first graffiti I've ever seen in Japan, surprisingly! It was in the underpass going back to the station.
The train we didn't get to take :(
I wonder why it is that train stories always loan themselves well to innuendo? Like when Shin and I chased down a steam engine last year, I joked that we were "getting steamy in Chiba". And this time I could pretty much sum up the day like "I slept with Shin on a bunch of trains. But we didn't go all the way."
I got 3 hours of sleep and he got 1.5 hours of sleep, and we met up on the first Takasaki-bound train of the morning. He slept for half of the way, but I was awake for all of it. I made him get up to see the sunrise, at any rate.
524 Akabane -> 655 Takasaki
710 Takasaki -> 813 Minakami
821 Minakami -> 825 Yubiso
Everything up to this point was fairly standard, we rode trains, we talked, we slept, we saw beautiful mountains and debated about which one was which, etc. We ran to the train transfers at Takasaki and Minakami because there were a TON of snowboarders and skiiers also taking the same route out towards Niigata, and we wanted seats on the trains.
Minakami, btw, is 水上, which I kept reading as "Mizukami".
Anyway, so Yubiso is a train station in the middle of a tunnel. Well, the outgoing platform is in a tunnel, anyway. The incoming platform is above land, and the entire station is unmanned and in the middle of fucking nowhere, with very little else there except, apparently a campground, an onsen, and a post office. So we took photos of the station and the tunnel and so on, and eventually holed up in the "waiting room" there to eat donuts for a bit and wait.
Went down to get a bus from Yubiso to Doai. An old couple was also waiting for the bus. They apparently had stayed at the onsen and were doing some kind of tour of the mountains of this area, something like that. They had come from Kyushu. Shin ended up talking to the lady a bunch, about Mt. Aso and other parts of Kyushu. The funny part was, I could understand everything they were saying, I just didn't know how to respond, so when he translated for me I was like (in Japanese) "Nono, I get it, I just didn't know what to say. Smoke all the way to Hokkaido when it erupted? That's unbelievable!" The lady was all like "OMG you speak Japanese! What are you two doing out here anyway?" and Shin's like "Uhh... we're enjoying being train nerds."
We rode the bus with them a bit once it showed up (it drove past us and we had to wave it down!) but we were only going one station, to Doai, which is ANOTHER tunnel station. The upper track, going incoming towards Takasaki, goes in a big loop and crosses itself in order to go down a big hill, but the lower track just goes through a new tunnel, which was dug in order to not have to go up and down the damn hill. But unlike Yubiso, there is a HUGE staircase from the upper platform to the lower platform -- it's great, you go across a bridge over a river, and the bridge feeds you right into the side of a mountain, where there's a big sign in the other direction explaining "This is Japan's #1 Mole Station. You have gone up 462 steps to arrive at this point, but there are still some more! Good job! Good luck!" And then there is literally just a HUGE FUCKING STAIRCASE IN A HUGE FUCKING TUNNEL going down. It doesn't take so long to go down, but at the bottom they warn you, "It's gonna take you at least 10 minutes to get up this thing."
They actually number the steps in intervals, and there's a bench around #240 or so, so I took a photo of it. This ended up having us chat about 15-212 and 18-240 for the rest of the way down. ("Which 240 did YOU mean?!")
There were two other people down there also taking photos of the tunnel and whatnot, though. Eventually the train showed up and we were on our merry way towards Koide... except...
905 Yubiso -> 910 Doai (bus)
956 Doai -> 1021 Echigo-Yuzawa
...Shin's camera ran out of battery in Doai. So he wanted to buy a new battery. That combined with a desire to get food and whatnot, when we opened my train schedule book and looked through it, we noticed there was a weekends train from Echigo-Yuzawa that ran at 11:19, so we could stop there for a while instead, since Shin said Koide was a very inaka town but EY is a big ski resort and train hub for heading to Hokuriku and so on.
And sure enough, we found convenience stores and food and everything near or in the station. We ended up getting some kind of pork katsudon thing for lunch, went shopping a little but didn't buy anything, and then went to our next train. Where again, I looked at cool snowy mountains, and Shin kept falling asleep.
1119 Echigo-Yuzawa -> 1202 Koide
And here, unfortunately, is where the adventure turned sour.
We should have been taking the Tadami train from Koide at 13:17, to 17:18 at Aizu-Wakamatsu. That was our entire purpose for this trip -- Shin said it was a beautiful line to take in the winter and see the lovely snowy countryside. Keep in mind this line runs in entirety all of THREE TIMES PER DAY each way, and has maybe 9 cars per day each way, but mostly only running for a few stations on either end, to hook school kids and old people up with bigger better trains at either end.
What we didn't know at the time was that a huge heavy nasty snowfall had kind of overrun the tracks somewhere near Tadami city itself -- in the 5 or so hours since a train had last passed through the area.
So Shin and I went walking into Koide town to waste an hour. There were lots of cute little shops on the town's main drag, but nobody actually walking around town, which was kind of freaky. We went a few blocks to a supermarket, and Shin told me last time he did this route he stopped in there for a bento. (They had sushi bento for 298 yen, which is dirt cheap.) This time we just got candy and walked back to the station, talking about the ramifications of Japan's youth tending to all desert the countryside and want to move to Tokyo.
We got ready to get on the train, and hear the announcement,
"Due to snow, the Tadami train is being delayed until 15:30."
And we're both like, "WTF?!"
Shin goes up and has an animated chat with the stationmaster, and finds out the details about the stations being shut down and so on and so forth. And he comes back and tells me, and we're both like "Dude, if it's delayed 2 hours, we can't stick to our original schedule without being stranded..." and we look through the train book trying to figure out how feasible it is, maybe taking a shinkansen. In the meantime, another Joetsu train arrives and a ton of tourists get off and rush to the Tadami train and take all the seats. And ALSO another train comes in and leaves to return to Echigo-Yuzawa.
Then there's another announcement: "The train will depart at 13:17 as scheduled. But we make no guarantees about when or if you will arrive ANYWHERE."
So we're doubly WTF. Shin has another chat with the stationmaster.
We get on the train, but after 5 minutes of discussing the situation, Shin says he recommends we turn around and go back. I'm a little sad about it, and debating whether I want to spend 5000 yen for a shinkansen or what... but we both notice the skies are getting really dark and the snow is getting heavier. We realize that we can still make it home if the train is up to about an hour behind schedule, but more than that and we're gonna be in trouble.
So, ugh, we end up getting off the train. It pulls out. I immediately feel super-sad. PLUS we have to wait another hour for the next Joetsu train back to civilization :(
Shin and I went to the waiting room to pass the time, chat a bit, and then both fell asleep for about 45 minutes before starting our journey back to Takasaki and so on. We spent most of the next two train segments telling riddles and stories, and Shin got out his laptop and surfed some train geek sites to see if there was any news about the Tadami line (we eventually learn it was delayed for an hour and a half, but we never find out if it landed safely.)
We also determined that the Tadami line implements a really primitive mutex, given that there's only one line and occasionally trains have to travel both ways at the same time. Shin said there's no central tower connecting it, but instead, the conductors give and take special tablets to/from stationmasters to let them know they're travelling on a specific track segment, so if a train arrives at a station and the tablet isn't available, that means someone else is on the segment, and you need to wait for them to release their lock on the track until you can use it.
1422 Koide -> 1543 Minakami
1548 Minakami -> 1651 Takasaki
We get out and walk around for a little while in Takasaki... basically long enough to eat taiyaki and for Shin to buy some kind of special bento from the Yokokawa station or something like that. We admire the bazillion Daruma all over the place, it must be a Gunma thing. Then we hop on another train.
1723 Takasaki -> 1852 Akabane
Shin sleeps through about half of this too, before he actually starts snoring so I wake him up and make him talk to me. I suggest we go do something like videogames or dinner, but he decides he'd rather go home and sleep. I point out that we should have still been on a train to Koriyama at this point, but he's just looking really zonked. He promises he'll take me to the train museum in Omiya when I get back to Japan, apologizes again, and we say goodbye and I step off the train as he continues to Ueno to go home.
I get dinner at Yokado and go home alone and sad and cold. The end.
Here are some photos:
Seriously, the inaka is beautiful.
View crossing over Minakami station.
Yubiso, one of the crazy tunnel stations.
Outside Yubiso on the top platform. LOTS of snow. I'm 5'7", for reference.
Good thing Shinsuke knew where the bus stop is or we'd never have found it.
At Doai. This is the bridge you cross over to get into the hole in the mountain to descend into the darkness of Doai's Lower Platform.
Shin also marvels at the height of the snow... and he's a little taller than I am!
It looks like a ski lodge, but it's a (mostly-deserted) train station.
"Good job climbin' them 462 stairs! Now you still gotta walk some and go up a bit more to get to the station exit... good luck!"
Me, at the top of the huge descent into darkness.
From the bottom of the stairs. Yikes.
The train arrives at Doai! Hooray!
Weird-ass statues at Echigo-Yuzawa. Supposedly you were supposed to pretend to be drunk and pose with them.
The snowplow train at Koide.
Koide's main drag, at 12pm on a Saturday afternoon. Serious ghost town thing going on here.
But at least they have a tardis. I guess that's how they get the fuck out of the countryside when the trains shut down due to snow.
But this was some of the first graffiti I've ever seen in Japan, surprisingly! It was in the underpass going back to the station.
The train we didn't get to take :(
I wonder why it is that train stories always loan themselves well to innuendo? Like when Shin and I chased down a steam engine last year, I joked that we were "getting steamy in Chiba". And this time I could pretty much sum up the day like "I slept with Shin on a bunch of trains. But we didn't go all the way."