26 Feb 2013

A trainy weekend (1)

Hello all,

Last weekend was a busy weekend with lots and lots and lots and lots of trains. The plan was to visit the parents of my girlfriend on friday and have a stopover in Ōmiya at the JR railway museum (鉄道博物館).

It's quite a trip from where we live, but it was en-route to where the parents of my girlfriend live, so that was pretty convenient. We had only a small suitcase with us with clothes, so on our way we went.

After a quite long, but quick trip to Ōmiya, we changed to the Saitama New Urban Transit for the Railway Museum station. This station was especially built for the museum, so you practically disembark in the museum.

The station itself isn't much in the style of the museum (mostly because Saitama New Urban Transit has not much to do with the JR Group), but outside it's very much museum-like.

With train wheels on display and the fronts of a D51 steam locomotive and 153 Series EMU (in school colours, orange and yellow), you already are in the right atmosphere right away. On the floor a Shinkansen schedule plan was made in tiles and behind glass there were also some interesting items on display.

We stowed away our luggage in the free lockers and went inside. Luckily, we got free entrance tickets, because my girlfriend had saved up on Lumine points, so we didn't have to pay ¥1,000 each (which is still pretty good for such a museum).

Upon entering the museum, I was overwhelmed by the sheer size of it. The museum is three stories high, with the floor level able to house full-size trains, which it does.

The centre piece is of course the C57 on the turntable, which gets turned around at 15:00 and blows its magnificent whistle. Other than that, around the turntable, legendary trains are positioned, such as two bonnet-nosed Ltd. Express 481 and 181 Series and, one of my favourites, an ED75 Type electric locomotive.

A map of all trains inside the museum can be found here: http://www.railway-museum.jp/zone/index.html It's in Japanese, but easy enough to understand I think.

At the end of the day, we had an advanced drivers class (we were too late to attend the entry class) and both of us did pretty well in it. I managed to mess up my perfect score with over speeding a 25km/h signal and answering a question wrongly (too much text) from 100 points to 60 points... Disappointing, but ah well. We got some cool white drivers handshoes (yes, that is correct railway jargon) to take home.

The parents of my girlfriend picked us up at Oyama and we went for some really good rāmen (Chinese style noodles) nearby. It was a good day, but the weekend had just begun! The next day would be a continuation of what we had started.

Cheers!

Toni

P.s. check out the texts when you hover over the pictures for a short description!

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