CHAPTER 6: 1880–1895

Extending and Integrating the System

Little is known about the artist Giei. This is one of his prints, showing one of the Dubs-built members of the original ten IJGR locomotives, bearing running number 9, entering Ueno station, around 1885 after the Akabane line had connected the Shimbashi line with the new Nippon Tetsudō and that locomotive could reach the new station via the rail link.

From about the time that the various sections of the Tsuruga– Ōgaki line were in full course of construction, it had become apparent to Inoue and the Railway Bureau that Japan would, in the not too distant future, be approaching a level of engineering and construction capability as would allow the nation to construct its own lines of railway on a reasonably grand scale without need of foreign assistance. Not only had the Government realized this, but the Japanese public had as well, from numerous self-congratulatory articles appearing in the press trumpeting the successes of such feats as the Ōsakayama Tunnel. Certain writers of the British engineering press clucked jadedly at the naïveté of the Japanese Press for effusing over the completion of a mere 650 meter tunnel as if it were a marvelous engineering accomplishment when such a event would scarcely have merited mention in a small-town newspaper in the UK by that point, and was similarly dismissive of the media’s hype surrounding the fact that when the two tunnel bores met at center, they were out of alignment only by a matter of a few inches, but only some 40 years hence, that had been the same posture adopted by the British press when the first engineering feats were being accomplished by the Stephensons, Locke, Brunel, and other pioneering railway builders. Undeterred, the exuberant nation heralded its accomplishments in a way that seemed at odds with its significance in the annals of world engineering: the Japanese had surpassed their own engineering benchmarks, and that was reason enough for jubilation. Perhaps the reason for the slightly begrudging tone some of the articles in the British engineering press of the day is explainable: The handwriting was on the wall, and the point at which British technical assistance would no longer be necessary had dimly appeared on the far horizon. From about this point onward, the British engineering journals of the day again and again adopt a cautious tone, advising that British interests in providing equipment and technical advisors to Japan’s railways needed to be carefully watched and aggressively promoted. When speaking of Japan, the self-assured attitude of railway colonialism that had infused the earlier articles began to disappear. Henceforth, the British engineering press seemed to realize that the question of further British involvement in railway development in Japan had reached the point where it probably not would be expected to contribute to colonization (as it would, at the hands of various powers, in places like Rhodesia, Burma, Indonesia, the Congo, and Vietnam.) This was not the proper subject of speculation for engineering journals, of course, but in an age of aggressive British colonization, such considerations were never far below the surface of the commentary. Instead, the rallying-call that ensued would largely couch the issue as one of remunerative trade opportunities for British interests, and the tone of the publications shifts to that of encouraging British consultants and equipment manufacturers to become competitive in face of the challenges.

The Japanese of course were all too aware of the dangers of reliance on a foreign power for technological assistance insofar as political dependency was concerned and were doing their level best to avoid it. They were quite transparent about their intentions to use foreign technical advisors and financing only for so long as was absolutely necessary. Nonetheless, the Japanese hadn’t reached a level of total self-sufficiency at this point, and certainly hadn’t reached the level where the native labor pool could furnish an adequate supply of qualified Japanese engineers to staff the building of lines that were about to be projected.

Delivering a paper before the Japan Society of London in 1899, Kadono Chōkyūrō (1867–1958), a Kōbudaigakkō graduate who had gone to America to work for four years on the Pennsylvania Railroad and on his return to Japan had served as an engineer on the San’yo Tetsudō, succinctly summarized the development of railways up to this point,

“[The Shimbashi, Kōbe–Kyōto–Ōtsu, and Tsuruga– Ōgaki] lines were undertaken by the Government and served as an experiment to prove to the people and country that railways are one of the most efficient means of transportation. The years following the completion of these lines were given to the study of all the details of the workings of railways, and railwaymen were being educated and fitted for other lines in contemplation.”

The first lines of course had proven to be quite successful, the anti-foreign sentiments that were feared might arise in the populace and be taken out on the yatoi had failed to materialize, and on the whole, the population in the areas affected were wholeheartedly embracing railways and were starting to call for extension, as was the military, having appreciated their usefulness during the Satsuma Rebellion. The successful completion of the Tsuruga–Ōgaki line had likewise given credence to Inoue’s hypothesis that the British yatoi were, as a class, as much a part of the problem on some levels as they were a part of the solution and were best used only for tasks the Japanese hadn’t yet mastered. The stage was set for expansion of the network. While Kadono’s observation would have the reader believe that the decision to slow the pace of building was deliberate, the truth of the matter was that the aftermath of the Satsuma Rebellion had seen the government printing large amounts of currency to finance the costs of quelling the rebellion, which in turn had quite a negative impact on the already-strained state coffers. By the late 1870s and early 1880s the effects were being felt in the inflation that gripped the nation, and there simply were not adequate funds available for rapid and extensive expansion of the two fledgling regional railway systems into a national network, absent resort to foreign borrowing. Nonetheless, the demand for further expansion was growing and the need was to all self-evident. What was required was a solution that would permit of its undertaking in view of the straitened condition of state finances at that time.

While it was easy enough to decide to build an 18 mile railway from Yokohama to Tōkyō as an experiment, and it was simple enough to decide to build a similar line from the deep water port of Kōbe to link the nation’s pre-eminent commercial center of Ōsaka and extend it on to the Imperial capital at Kyōto, there comes a point when experimentation must give way to concerted planning, and the concerns of railway planning in Japan in 1880 were no different from those that obtained elsewhere in the world at that time.

Inoue and his contemporaries at the Railway Commission had to allocate meager resources at best. As they looked forward to plan the next lines, that planning would be guided by several factors, the primary one of which was the overall utility of the line to development of Japan as a modern nation. Of course, that over-arching principle could come to be applied in various guises, which began to manifest themselves as themes recurrently encountered in subsequent planning: projected lines would be slated for construction based upon their strategic military usefulness in defending the realm, some would be chosen by virtue of their usefulness in fostering and stimulating industrial or agricultural development, others would be chosen due to their usefulness in development of geographically inaccessible or sparsely inhabited parts of the realm (together with all the potential for exploitation of the natural resources found in such regions that is therein entailed) or in order to consolidate governmental power and promote national unity in remote areas, while still others would be chosen simply by virtue of their providing a quick means of transportation and communication between and among major population centers. The new undertakings that arose reflect each and every one of these themes in application.

It was a foregone conclusion by anyone in the nation who had an opinion on the subject that the three disparate lines should be linked, so that Tōkyō, Kyōto, and Ōsaka, the three most important cities of the realm, would have integrated rail communication. Of necessity, such a line would pass closely enough to the regional centers of Nagoya and Shizuoka that branches to each could be constructed, bringing five important cities and two of her best, most modern ports (Kōbe and Yokohama) into contiguous communication; the benefit to the nation and to its trade would have been immeasurable, but the project was stopped cold by the Satsuma Rebellion. About the time of the completion of the Ōgaki line, the government began to realize in earnest the importance of railway development, and as the route of the proposed new lines was under consideration, the newly-formed Army, lead by its head Prince Yamagata (later to serve as Prime Minister) was vociferous in championing the absolute necessity of connecting Tōkyō, via Takasaki, with Ōgaki. Yamagata was insistent upon a route that would stay well inland of the shores, far from the range of foreign naval bombardment, and be much more easily defensible: the Japanese Army had its hands full for the time being simply defending the nation from rebellion and the threat of Western imperialism. Already stretched thin, it did not need to take on the task of defending roughly 375 miles of railway line exposed along a coastline between Tōkyō and Ōsaka if it could avoid it. A rival route along the eastern seaboard of Honshū would have been cheaper, though not as direct, but to its credit the cities of Nagoya and Shizuoka would have been fallen conveniently right in the path of the route, avoiding branches to each of these important cities. The question of which route was preferable was one of the issues that nagged both Boyle and Inoue. By as early as 1877 enough data was in hand to permit Boyle to report favorably on the central route, and a fairly extensive summarization proposed route appears in the May 25, 1877 issue of The Engineer. National security concerns had won the day, and the route selected approximated that of the old Nakasendō (“Through the mountains”) road, which roughly followed the central axis of Honshū. The government financed the project by means of a 7% ¥20,000,000 loan, the Nakasendō Tetsudō Kosai, which it raised domestically.

As can be seen from the accompanying 1885 map on page 51, building from Ōgaki would not have presented any serious difficulties, but for the fact that three rivers with bad, muddy bottoms, the Ibigawa, Nagaragawa, and Kisogawa would require considerably complicated bridging. As the erection of suitably permanent bridging in this area would take considerable amounts of time on leaving Ōgaki, given the equipment and construction methods available to the Railway Bureau at the time, Inoue hit upon an alternative method to speed construction: the line would commence eastward from Ōgaki, and the slow task of bridging would proceed, but simultaneously a feeder line would be built from Handa or Kamezaki on the coast to Nagoya, up which materials and supplies could be brought for building the segment of line up the Kiso valley beyond the segments requiring the most complicated bridging. In the event, it was found that Handa harbor didn’t have as suitable a depth of water, and that Taketoyo was better suited, so the line was set to be constructed from there. The main line would thereafter follow the route of the Kiso river north-easterly (again, roughly approximating the “Kisokaidō” segment of the Nakasendō) as it started its ascent into the Japan Alps to the Usui Pass and thence towards the Kantō Plain beyond.

From Tōkyō, Inoue found that the southwesterly approach was likewise not so straightforward, as mountains were encountered very quickly. How best to supply the construction efforts in a highly mountainous terrain (a feat that had never been undertaken in Japan before) to enable the bringing in of supplies and removing spoil during tunneling, grading, and cutting was also a major issue. The route the new line would follow leaving Tōkyō would be northwesterly, towards Takasaki and then commence its ascent towards what even in those times was a fashionable mountain resort for Japanese and foreign well-to-do alike, Karuizawa, and onwards towards a junction. It was feared that this line would be inadequate for supply purposes at the higher elevations and using an identical strategy, Inoue decided that another feeder line would be constructed from Naoetsu, a navigable coastal port (by standards of the day) on the Sea of Japan side of Honshū, southward to Ueda to link with the Tōkyō–Takasaki–Karuizawa line and from there to a junction with the line coming up from Ōgaki through the Kiso River valley, permitting supplies to reach the remote mountainous area where construction would be in progress, and permitting the spoil of excavation to be disposed of more easily. While the Naoetsu–Ueda line was primarily built as a “construction feeder,” it would also, on completion, serve the useful function of providing the second line to cross Honshū from Tōkyō, much as the Tsugaru–Lake Biwa–Ōtsu link did for Kyōto and Ōsaka. When the link was finally made between Naoetsu and Takasaki, the line was at first commonly known as the Usui Line, but eventually settled into it’s official name: Shin’etsu Line, from the first two kanji characters of the former feudal provinces of Shinano (present day Nagano Prefecture) and Echigo (present day Niigata Prefecture), which it connected. Construction of the Naoetsu–Ueda line was authorized in March 1885 and as it would operate as a non-contiguous line for some time, small shop facilities were built at Nagano, where the rolling stock for the line would be built, and where locomotives could be repaired. The Taketoyo line was authorized two months later in June.

Even the largest and most important of Japanese stations could be quite utilitarian in design after the Japanese assumed responsibility for design functions, as this early view of Ueno Station attests. Compared to stations built under English guidance (such as Shimbashi, Yokohama, Kyōto, and Ōsaka) Ueno demonstrates domestic concern for avoiding unnecessary expense. The only apparent luxuries are its brick construction and the lip service paid to European ornament with the Acanthus leaf finial and two urns flanking the pediment centering a small faux double window to such ludicrous effect that they would have best been omitted. Ueno was the terminal from which the Nippon Tetsudō started, and still is Tōkyō’s principal point of departure for destinations to the north of Japan.

While Inoue and the Government were grappling with these logistical difficulties and engrossed in planning, other forces had come into play. First was the inflation that arose from the Government policy of printing of large amounts of paper money mentioned earlier, and the ensuing financial weakness of the Treasury, a situation only compounded by the payments to pension of the samurai that has been mentioned. Eventually, austerity measures instituted by Finance Minister Matsukata Masayoshi would put the nation on a more stable fiscal path, but the effects of his reforms were still years away. During this critical period before those results had been felt, and felicitously for the future of railway construction, a second force took advantage of the situation.

As early as 1869, the irrepressible entrepreneur Takashima was pressing the government for subsidization of a proposed railway-building scheme to be undertaken by private enterprise, which he was proposing to form. As mentioned, his request was rebuffed. Only a year after the completion of the Shimbashi line, the daimyōs of the houses of Date, Ikeda, Hosokawa, Kamei, Mori, Matsudaira, and Yamanouchi had petitioned the government for the right to build a railroad from Tōkyō northward to Aomori, the most prominent town at the northern-most tip of Honshū. That petition was not granted, but the government did go so far as to construe it, reportedly at Inoue’s initiative, as a request to purchase the existing Yokohama–Tōkyō line and entered into sales discussions with the group. An association styled the Tōkyō Tetsudō Kaisha (Tōkyō Railway Company) was formed, and an actual contract of sale was executed, calling for installment payments. For a brief moment, around 1873, it appeared that the Japanese government might be considering getting out of the railway business. But the company was never able to make any payments beyond the second, the purchase accordingly failed, and the company was disbanded in 1878, despite the best efforts to effectuate what we would today call a “rescue” on the part of the legendary Shibusawa Eiichi, then a budding entrepreneur-industrialist-philanthropist who would go on to be involved in numerous railway ventures (among which were the Nippon Tetsudō, the Gan’etsu Tetsudō, the Hoku’etsu Tetsudō, and the Seoul–Pusan Railway) and ultimately would achieve in Japan the stature similar to that accorded to Henry Ford or Andrew Carnegie in America.

In the period following the Satsuma Rebellion, various nobles loyal to the government had also pressed for a charter to construct a railway. Reeling under the debt of the Satsuma Rebellion, painfully aware of the need to keep the still-powerful daimyō satisfied and complacent, and astutely realizing that the heavy treasury expenditures from the daimyō financial settlement could in effect be “re-captured” and put to work constructing the railways that were still, after all, a government policy goal, albeit with the political downside of being privately-owned and controlled, gradually the government came to see the authorization of privately-owned railways as an expedient by which it could extricate itself from the current difficulties it faced as to how to find the means to finance further railway expansion. So it came to pass that in 1881, imperial assent was given to the charter of a corporation that had ambitiously been styled the Nippon Tetsudō Kaisha (“Japan Railway Company”) by the nobles of the Imperial Court and former samurai who were promoting the scheme. Looking back on its formation, Inoue also mentions the paternal government motive toward the samurai investors: that by providing a guaranteed investment outlet, the government in effect would prevent some daimyō from making bad investments leading to bankruptcy and further class alienation, and keep those investors actively engaged, with a stake in the economic well-being of the nation. The route of the proposed line ran from Tōkyō northward to Aomori at the northern tip of Honshū, serving the triple purpose of developing the Tōhoku region, connecting it with the Kantō plain, further cementing Hokkaidō to the political comity of the realm so that no future Republics of Yezo would occur, and providing a bulwark against potential Russian colonial encroachments from the direction of Vladivostok and the Sakhalin Islands. By this time, Inoue had become a staunch believer that the railway system should be state-owned, but ever the pragmatist, was obliged to yield to the exigencies of the day. As with the first government lines, the decision was made without any serious traffic studies, profitability or cost projections, or other due diligence being made; the whole venture again being premised upon educated conjecture. However, given that there were no serious forms of land transportation against which to compete, given that capital was likely to be scarce and therefore unlikely to be invested in competitive ventures, and given the government’s unfavorable policy toward permitting construction of competing lines, in hindsight it is not surprising that many daimyō did indeed invest a sizable amount of the proceeds of their government settlement into the Nippon Tetsudō (and as it developed, into other future privately-owned railways). In a financial sense, the decision to allow the formation of joint-stock publicly-traded corporations to construct and operate railways in Japan made a good deal of common sense at the time. Nevertheless, subsequent private railway companies were not destined to receive as advantageous a set of subsidies and guarantees as did the Nippon.

An interesting view of the yards of Ueno Station as a train of short passenger stock behind a brass-domed A8 type 2-4-2T tank locomotive departs, taken around the time of Nationalization. Four-wheel passengers cars predominate in this scene, at a time when more modern passenger stock had become much more commonplace on the IJGR and other of the “Big Five.” Out of the roughly forty vehicles in the view, only one appears to be mounted on trucks. Note the modest diameter turntable that could probably accommodate no locomotive larger than a mogul and the 1040 Class 0-6-0T shunter (built at the Nippon’s Ōmiya shops) in the left foreground, introduced in 1904 and easily identifiable by its steam dome mounted twin safety valves, rectangular cab spectacles, and curious lid-covered coal bunker.

Rickshaws are the only vehicles in sight in this 1890s view of Ueno terminal taken of the side of the terminal that was parallel to the tracks. The Nippon Tetsudō’s rail line would have been visible just to the right of this building. The one-story brick structure successfully withstood the Great Kantō Earthquake of 1923 only to be consumed in the ensuing fires, which left nothing more than an empty shell of untoppled masonry.

The corporate charter of the Nippon Tetsudō was quite generous and can be found set forth in whole in the appendix. Not only were there financial guarantees of return, but the charter arrangements and understandings provided that construction of the line itself was to be undertaken by the IJGR Railway Bureau under Inoue’s supervision, neatly serving the dual purpose of keeping Inoue’s staff gainfully employed and intact while relieving the management of the Nippon Tetsudō of the necessity of finding and hiring engineering talent, dealing with surveys, construction difficulties, materials and equipment acquisition, defaulting contractors, unforeseen calamities, and labor problems. All management had to do was to finance construction and, on completion, commence operation of a railway the government had agreed to build for them. Inoue contentedly shifted his engineers, skilled work crews, and construction operations from the Sekigahara pass environs to the region north of Tōkyō.

Kadono Chōkyūrō’s narrative continues:

"... the first charter was not granted to a private railway company until 1881, about ten years after the experiment was first installed by the Government. The year 1881 may be termed an epoch in the history of Japanese railways. The comparative inactivity for about ten years after [the lines initially planned in] 1870 cannot entirely be attributed to an intentional check for the purpose of training and study. There may have been other causes necessitating the inactivity during that period. Whatever was the case, as we look back upon it now, the country was nonetheless benefited by the slowness of progress in railways in their first stage. Time was allowed for study of the railway policy of the country as well as the details connected with construction, equipment, and management. Dating, then, from 1881, both the Government and private companies have been engaged in active work all over the country.... The mileage began to augment steadily year after year... but... the Government was careful in studying each project before a charter for it was granted... The Government does not sanction the construction of competing lines. This policy seems a salutary one for the country. The disastrous waste of none too-plentiful capital has thus been avoided. The work of the Government Railway Department in surveying and reporting upon all feasible lines and classifying them according to their respective merits, whether commercial or strategic, and thus affording a guidance, so to speak, for railways to be constructed in future, was welcome and wise. ‘The official programme’ of projected railways, thus formulated, was sanctioned by the Diet, and governs the construction of important lines in the future. This seemingly conservative aspect in our railways at their first stage cannot be regretted. Subsequent steady development has vindicated the wisdom of these cautious steps.”

Here was a fundamental feature of the future pattern for railway development once the government allowed formation of private railway companies: in order to conserve on scarce capital, to insure that it was not poured into duplicate efforts, and to subsidize indirectly the returns of private railways, the government adopted the policy of not authorizing competing lines, an approach which was Japanese to the soul, and alien to British and American sensibilities. A mixed model of government and Shitetsu (private railway) development came into being, perhaps more similar to the French approach to development of a national railway system, although not necessarily for identical reasons. Each private railway was assured of a monopolistic position in the region through which it passed. The government also adopted a policy of building railways through regions where private enterprise would not build, so the government-owned railway system grew to become a fragmented one. Naturally, the government always reserved the right to purchase any railway line which it sanctioned, requiring its purchase right to be set forth in the railway’s charter. In advance of the opening of private railways, in July, 1883 the government enacted legislation extending all prior railway law to the new private lines.

The Nippon Tetsudō took delivery of twelve 4-4-0 locomotives from Dubs in 1884 to 1885, the class being designated Class 5230 with the renumbering scheme that followed nationalization. The artist has rendered a fairly faithful depiction of one of the class members, with its telltale weatherboard tender. The scene depicts what night travel on the Nippon Tetsudō aboard a train of mid-Meiji passenger stock with open air verandas, after adoption of the color stripe below the windows indicating the car’s class, in the final years of the 19th Century might have been like. One glaring inaccuracy is the six wheel tender frame—these locomotives were furnished with four wheel tenders.

The construction projects of the government’s Takasaki-Karuizawa line (the first link to Kyōto) and the newborn Nippon Tetsudō were combined. On what was then the northern outskirts of Tōkyō, a suitable site for a terminal was chosen at a park called Ueno, destined to become Ueno station, the second principal station in Tōkyō. The line would run to Ōmiya, where adequate plans were put in place for a shop and maintenance facility. To this day, Ōmiya is one of the largest and most important railway shops in Japan. From Ōmiya, two lines diverged; the Nippon Tetsudō mainline turning northwards following the great northern highway, the Oshu-kaidō, from Kurihashi station towards Utsunomiya, while what would be the Nippon Tetsudō’s Takasaki branch proceeded northwesterly towards Takasaki. From Takasaki, the IJGR proper would continue on to Karuizawa, but naturally running rights into Ueno station had been reserved for IJGR trains. Here again another signature feature of railway development in Japan, where because of the government policy of not sanctioning competing lines, and the tendency of one line to build itself as an extension of an existing line (be it private or government), running rights into stations were much more common than in the US, where competing railways often would refuse such privileges to each other, necessitating municipalities to enact ordinances regulating railway access within corporate limits to permit use by later-built lines or to build “Union Stations.”

As passenger traffic increased, resulting in longer and heavier trains, the small 2-4-0T tank locomotives originally used on IJGR lines were unable to handle the loads. New 2-4-2T tanks with Joy’s Radial valve gear were imported from the UK to meet these needs starting in 1886 as the mileage of runs increased. These became the celebrated A8 Class and were an early mainstay of the IJGR and new Nippon Tetsudō for short to mid-range services. One is seen here with a Tōkyō suburban train in this photograph from the mid-to-late 1890s. By this point in time, the original end platform coaching stock on the American pattern had given way to rigid wheelbase 4 wheel compartment coaches in the British fashion, built in Kōbe or Shimbashi on a standard underframe and wheelbase, regardless of whether the body was to be First, Second, or Third Class.

Equipment for the Nippon Tetsudō had to be brought overland or by coastal lighter to the start point, as the line would have no physical connection to the Shimbashi line, which fact could pose its own logistical nightmares. One of the locomotives, a small Manning Wardle 0-6-0T tank locomotive that had been purchased for construction of the line, had arrived in 1882 in Yokohama in pieces, been assembled and tested at Shimbashi shops, and loaded back onto a coastal lighter to be transported to one of the construction staging areas on the northern edge of Tōkyō. As the small craft carrying it approached the precincts of a branch of the Zenkō temple on the banks of the Ara River, disaster struck and the boat sank. Salvage operations had to be hurriedly improvised, with temple parishioners assisting in the raising of the submerged locomotive using nothing more than improvised cranes of heavy wooden beams, block and tackle, winches, and sheer muscle. Set on dry land before the waters of the Ara River could do irreparable damage to the working parts, the locomotive immediately became known as “the Zenkō locomotive” and became the Nippon Tetsudō’s locomotive No. 1. It was one of the few Japanese locomotives to be formally named, bearing the kanji Zenkō on its tanksides in the ancient style of Chinese chop seals,¹ in tribute to the temple at which it received its baptism and the congregation instrumental in its salvation.

Events such as the loss of the Zenkō locomotive served to underscore the necessity and utility of having a rail link between this northern rail system and the Shimbashi–Yokohama line to the south. A connecting line was authorized and the Railway Bureau surveyed and began concurrent construction of a 12¾ mile connecting line for the new Nippon Tetsudō running from Akabane on the new Ueno–Takasaki line, in a counter-clockwise arc, through Shinjuku and Shibuya, then around what was then the outskirts of Tōkyō to a junction at Shinagawa on the Shimbashi line where the Nippon Tetsudō was granted running powers into Shimbashi. Known originally as the Akabane line, the line later became the oldest segment of Tōkyō’s pre-eminent belt line, today’s Yamanote Line. The first segment of the Takasaki line (38 miles) was opened to Kumagaya, a bit more than halfway to Takasaki, in 1883. Takasaki, at 63 miles, was reached the next year, and again was officially opened by the Emperor when he rode by train to Takasaki on June 25, 1884 for the ceremony. There were five trains a day in each direction; the fastest of which took 3 hours 16 minutes between Ueno and Takasaki. For the longer distances involved, larger locomotives began to be ordered: 4-4-0s in the first significant quantities and 2-4-2T tank locomotives with Joy valve gear that would serve as the workhorse of railways in Japan for many years to come, the ubiquitous A8 class. The Railway Bureau handled ordering the locomotives on behalf of the Nippon and all future private lines for many years and eventually also came to act as a buyer of used locomotives and clearing house for used or excess locomotives that private lines wished either to dispose of or to purchase. In the spring of 1884, the first financial returns for the initial segment of the Nippon Tetsudō were made public, revealing a surplus well in excess of ten percent of the capital invested. The Nippon Tetsudō was a resounding success; so much so that within just a year, purchase of its shares had been so stimulated that it had grown to become the largest joint-stock company in Japan. As demand for Nippon Tetsudō shares spread, a small boom in other railway shares of new ventures ensued. That point marks the beginning of active public participation in railway development.

On March 1, 1885, the Nippon Tetsudō’s “Akabane line” was opened to traffic, with five trains a day in each direction, creating a link between the fledgling railway and the IJGR’s Shimbashi line to Yokohama. The opening of the Nippon line that same year to Utsunomiya, four chains² shy of 130 route miles from Ueno, brought about what is said to be the first sale of pre-packed lunch boxes, immediately popularized as ekiben, a contraction of eki-bento, station lunchbox. These were said to have first been sold at Utsunomiya, and their popularity spread so quickly that in short time, the industry had its own labor union, the “Union of Lunch Box Salesmen.” As the system matured, the Railway Bureau became more concerned with administrative and safety issues and 1885 also saw the adoption of regulations governing shipment of explosives.

Contemporary with the opening of the first section of the Nippon Tetsudō, but on a much smaller scale, on June 25, 1882 the Tōkyō Basha Tetsudō (basha is a word meaning “horse car”) began operating horse-drawn streetcars from Shimbashi to Nihonbashi, the “zero mile post” of Tōkyō, from which all distances in Japan were traditionally measured, and with it, Tōkyō’s first street car service was inaugurated. Petitions to start such an undertaking date to at least 1877 when a Belgian company had petitioned for a concession to build and operate a street railway system in Tōkyō, which given the government’s policy of domestic control was not surprisingly refused. Once opened, the new streetcar company also quickly proved to be profitable and from that first horse line, seeds were planted that eventually resulted in Tōkyō’s present-day subway system.

Well before the Railway Bureau was busy building the first stages of the Nippon Tetsudō to Utsunomiya, and among other things installing the first telephone link in 1880 to assist in traffic dispatching between Kōbe and Sannnomiya, other government agencies had become involved in railway building. It had been known for some time that there was abundant iron in the region of Kamaishi, about 400 miles north of Tōkyō, just inland on the eastern seaboard, and one of the first blast furnaces in Japan was built there. In one of the first acts after the Meiji restoration, the newly-installed government conducted the first scientific surveys of the realm for natural resources, and the reports for the Kamaishi environs were highly promising. Particularly large concentrations of high-grade iron ore had been discovered in the area of Ōhashi, 20 miles inland from Kamaishi. A scheme was quickly put forth to develop these deposits with mines, smelters, reverberatory furnaces and to that end the government contracted with British interests in 1875 to build a steel mill at Ōhashi, where the deposits lay. As Ōhashi was inland and a large output was anticipated, it was decided to build a railway between the there and the closest good harbor in order to facilitate the enterprise. The gauge chosen for the line was 2’ 9” (838 mm), basically a small gauge used for light industry. By happenstance, the brother of the same Dr. Theobald Purcell who was unable to cure Edmund Morel, Gervaise Purcell, one of the English yatoi who had been engaged as a civil engineer on the Ōsaka–Kyōto segment, was without any pressing assignment at the time. He agreed to be transferred to the Bureau of Engineering, Mining Department in 1875 and was put in charge of surveying, laying out, and building the line from Ōhashi to Kamaishi, where he arrived in early July. Gervaise Purcell left a terse diary that records his time at Kamaishi.

The entire Tōkyō area railway “network” around 1884–1885 is shown in red on this map. The fledgling Nippon Tetsudō leaves to the north, branching at Ōmiya to proceed north-westerly to Takasaki, which was reached in 1884. There, an end-on connection was planned with the IJGR Shin’etsu line, which was about to begin construction. The other branch shown is the Nippon Tetsudō mainline northward, which had only reached Utsunomiya. To the west of Utsunomiya lies Nikkō, one of the top tourist destinations of Japan, soon to be destined to have its own rail line, completed in 1890. When the railhead reached Nikkō, it was just a short distance away from the major copper deposits found at Ashio, and commercial exploitation of these reserves was greatly stimulated. The IJGR Shimbashi line from Yokohama is shown entering Tōkyō from the south. The Akabane Line (completed in 1885 just prior to the Utsunomiya section) is not shown.

Little remembered today, the A8 class 2-4-2T locomotives with Joy’s valve gear and radial front axles were at one time widespread. They were built by Naysmith Wilson (107 units), Dubs (61), Vulcan (18 units), Brooks (4 units), and Kraus (2 units). In addition, 44 class members were domestically built. They handled all types of traffic, from crack express trains to the lowly freight and many served well into the 20th Century, some lasting into the post WWII period. A8 class locomotives could be seen operating on the IJGR and the following lines: the Nippon, Kobu, Sobu, Kyōto, Bōso, Hokkaidō, Kansai, Sangu, Kyūsushū, Bisai, Narita and San’yo railways. This view from the 1890s shows an A8 piloting a five-car passenger train of bogie stock along a double tracked right-of-way: proof that the locomotives were still quite capable of being assigned mainline duties, even though 4-4-0 tender engines from Britain had by then become commonplace and larger 2-6-2 tank locomotives from America were starting to be imported.

Maebashi was an important provincial town that was located on what was initially the terminus of the northwestern branch of the original phase of the Nippon Tetsudō that the IJGR was retained to build. This view of the station just before nationalization shows a Nippon Tetsudō passenger train at rest at the platform, by which time the line had been extended and the station was no longer a terminus.

The Kamaishi project and its little railway were ill-fated almost from the inception. Subsequent writers have remarked in hindsight that the technical advisors who had been retained recommended building furnaces that were unsuited to function on the lower grade local charcoal that was produced in the region to fuel them. Purcell, according to his diary entries, had only been in Kamaishi less than a month when he ran into difficulties with his supervisors that were apparently to last throughout the course of his employment there. Purcell was left in the dark as to many details, even as to whether the line would use horse or steam motive power, but was advised rather vaguely to build a line with bridges that could support the weight of a 20 ton locomotive. (He began work at least by the end of August.) Such was the nature of working on the early projects in the first years of Meiji, when projects launched with less than rigorous study and planning, and revisions were often the order of the day.

Difficult as it may be to believe today, this pocket card contains essentially the condensed schedule of all passenger trains for the northern half of Honshū, including Tōkyō and Yokohama, as of March 16th, 1886. The fastest train speeds between Shimbashi and Yokohama compare creditably with the time required for the same trip between the corresponding points today. As is seen from the schedule, at this time, the Nippon Tetsudō was operating two passenger trains a day in each direction along its mainline north. Note also that compartment carriages were assured as a first class luxury on the Maebashi trains, perhaps a Victorian reflection of Management’s British-influenced aversion to American-style center aisle carriages as being a bit too republican.

The lack of running number on the smokebox door and the small corporate mon on the side of the tender identify the locomotive heading this express as a Nippon Tetsudō 4-4-0. It is possibly a Beyer-Peacock product judging from the maker’s plate over the splasher, although it is difficult to discern whether this is a member of what would become IJGR 5300 or 5500 class upon nationalization. The view is at an unidentified location along one of the Nippon Tetsudō’s lines.

October 1877 saw a flood that destroyed a quarter of the line’s work, “the most costly quarter” as Purcell described it. By November, bridge spans had arrived and were being placed for the line’s third bridge. Later in the month a hoisting engine had arrived and was satisfactorily tested. By January 1878 work had progressed up to the pilings for Bridge No. 4, and later, spans arrived for Bridge No. 2. In the midst of this, Purcell lards his diary with references from his co-workers complaining that the furnace was situated in a bad location and that the dimensions for the mill drawings were wrong, and with his own complaint of significant delays in delivery of railway materials. By March 1878 work was progressing on Bridges Nos. 1 and 5 but as late as April 1878 the final location of the right of way was still being “settled.” By July, Purcell was complaining to one of his Japanese supervisors that at the present rate of progress, it would take an additional 2½ years to complete the railway and 50 more masons from Tōkyō (to aid in building bridge abutments) were promised. It had been decided in Tōkyō, apparently without consultation with Purcell, to order steam locomotives for the line. When Purcell got his first look at the drawings and specifications for the locomotives on August 29, 1878, he didn’t like them and was of the opinion that they were not of a type suitable for the road he was constructing: evidence of bureaucracy at the Department of Mines ordering equipment for a project without determining the actual needs in situ. By November 1878 the initial tests of some of the machinery for the furnaces had been conducted and Bridge No. 7 was started the next month.

Finally, on January 28, 1879 a schooner arrived from Yokohama with the steam locomotives that had been trans-shipped from a steamer arriving there around the 18^th (coastal shipping of the time was predominantly by sailing ship) and planning began for off-loading. It is hard to appreciate today what the arrival of a schooner-shipment of steam locomotives entailed at Kamaishi in 1879. A watercolor done by Purcell shows only a rudimentary quay at Kamaishi alongside which the schooner could moor, with no permanent hoisting cranes. The locomotives would have been hoisted from the schooner by means of improvised beams or improvised cranes and the “hoisting engine” of which Purcell spoke; landed ashore by might and muscle alone. By February 8^th, adequate preparations and equipment—tackle, beams, pulleys and lines, skids, jacks—had been made and assembled for off-loading. Almost immediately disaster struck when the first locomotive was dropped over the side and lost into the harbor, taking one of the coolies with it and drowning him. By the 11^th, the second locomotive was carefully and successfully landed. Thereafter, the first was successfully salvaged from the harbor with a method Purcell was forced to improvise, by lashing two boats together a beam’s length apart with a winch in each boat, using divers to hook chains to the submerged locomotive, and hoisting it bit by bit, with nothing more than the two winches and sheer muscle. The body of the unfortunate coolie was found pinned under the locomotive frame. The first locomotive was finally brought ashore on the 13^th. In all, the task of unloading two very small, toy-sized tank locomotives³ consumed more than a two weeks of preparation, planning and effort. March saw the appearance of a fine new pump car or handcar for Purcell’s use and he gleefully reports on the 21^st that he obtained a speed of 12 mph on its first test. At the very end of April the first engine driver reported for duty and “loco coal” arrived.⁴ By June one of the turn-tables was in place, and had passed tests. The next month saw the arrival of an inspection delegation from Tōkyō who pronounced themselves satisfied with the railway.

This view presumably shows Chūō-dori, the “Main Street” of the Ginza district, in Tōkyō in the 1880s, after the Tōkyō Basha Tetsudō (Tōkyō Horsecar Railway) had come into existence in 1882, but before electrification of the line and introduction of trolleys in the 1903. Note that the double roof construction has been adopted for the domestically-produced tramcar. The first route ran from Shimbashi Station, through Ginza, to the famous Nihonbashi bridge (the “zero milepost” of Tōkyō) and was later extended thence to the Nippon Tetsudō’s terminus at Ueno, linking the two major railway stations of the Capital. The world-renowned Tōkyō metropolitan transport system grew from these relatively modest beginnings.

Apparently, there were continued disagreements between Purcell and his supervisor, Mōri Shigesuke (“Jusuke”).⁵ Mōri was the Chief Engineer of the Kamaishi project and later was to become the Deputy Chief Engineer of the IJR, but, judging by some of Purcell’s entries, he was also the bane of Purcell’s existence. Things had deteriorated so much between Purcell and his superiors on the little Kamaishi line that at one point Holtham was sent out to review matters and report what was amiss. He went north (on one of the government ships that Brunton was chronically complaining were being taken from him) in the autumn of 1879, at the doing of Purcell, to inspect the line and to judge whether to condemn one of the new locomotives.⁶ The ministry gave him a mandate to inspect the entire line, the works, mines, etc. Instead of condemning anything and coming to Purcell’s rescue, Holtham wrote that he “blessed them all... and left them to quarrel among themselves as to whom... they should blame for all mishaps.” One imagines Holtham concluded that there was adequate blame on all sides of the acrimony and from what one can discern, not much was resolved.

Misfortunes continued. The shops burnt down in October 1879, followed by flooding. There were numerous earthquakes encountered, with the expected resultant damage. The “gantry” (crane?) they were in the course of building was blown over in a gale. One of the ships carrying rolling stock for the line foundered in December 1879 on the voyage out from Yokohama. The workers could be problematic. On the day Bridge No. 16 was opened, one particular worker thought it amusing that he could out-run one of the slow-moving construction trains, jump in front of it, and then jump aside laughing before being overtaken. Evidently he was unaware of the bad job-safety precedent it was setting but was disciplined by an angry Purcell in a thoroughly stern Victorian manner: he was pushed headlong over an embankment to tumble down as his punishment.

Joseph Ury Crawford was the engineer recommended by Thomas Scott of the Pennsylvania Railroad to the Japanese Government to oversee building of the first railway in Hokkaidō, the Poronai Tetsudō, which opened in 1881 and marked the beginning of American design and engineering influence on Japanese railways. He was well-liked and remembered in Japan; so much so that at the end of the Meiji reign, long after he had returned to the United States, the Japanese Government continued to call upon him to serve as a consultant from time to time, and in 1929 his memory was commemorated by the dedication of a bronze bust in the Sapporo station forecourt.

By about the time the ship bringing the rolling stock foundered, Purcell had gotten his fill and resigned. His resignation was accepted in January 1880, with Mōri being assigned to his duties. The calamities continued unabated at Kamaishi, and when the entire plant was finally finished and opened to operation, it proved to be a notable failure, probably the largest failure of all early Meiji industrialization projects. After an initial period of struggles, the decision was made, almost certainly with great reluctance, to shut the disappointing plant down entirely and abandon it, undoubtedly at a bitter loss to those charged with shepherding the thinly-stretched state coffers of the time. Japan’s first attempt at modern steel production had been a miserable failure, although it would later be successfully resurrected. While the Kamaishi venture is of considerable import and interest from the viewpoint of early industrial development, the Kamaishi railway would merit little more than a footnote were it not for events which were to unfold in the aftermath of that failure, and the legacy those events would leave.

* * * * * * * * *

While the IJGR was building the Tsuruga–Ōgaki line, the Nippon Tetsudō proposal was being considered, and matters were proceeding under ill-fated stars at Kamaishi. Another governmental agency, yet further north, was set to take a turn at railway building. In the Tokugawa era, the island of Hokkaidō was largely the realm of the indigenous Ainu people who the Japanese had driven eastward and northward over centuries of gradual encroachment and skirmishing, and there was only quasi-recognized sovereignty over the island. One of the results of the upset in affairs brought about by the arrival of foreign powers on Japan’s shores was the painfully apparent need to put the island of Hokkaidō (then known as Yezo) under unquestionable Japanese sovereignty and control, lest some nation such as Russia, not far off at Vladivostok, should lay claim to it. The Japanese Government quickly established an agency known as the Kaitakushi, which was charged with the development and colonization of Yezo, newly recognized as a province, as opposed to a “territorial island.” Immigration from other parts of Japan was actively encouraged. It is perhaps not too far off mark to compare America’s “Wild West” to Japan’s Wild North and the similarities were not lost on the Kaitakushi. American technical advisors were hired to advise in agricultural development of the island, as it was envisioned that it could be developed into a center of agrarian production for the realm. The results are seen to this day, as Hokkaidō is noted in Japan for its dairy products, much as Wisconsin is in America or Devon and Cornwall are in the United Kingdom. As a result of the government’s prospecting surveys, large deposits of commercially exploitable coal were also found on the island, and in the age of steam, it was a foregone conclusion that these coal-beds should become productive. Indeed the coal deposits of Hokkaidō would become the second most important source of coal within Japan. The Kaitakushi launched a scheme to develop the most promising of these coalbeds at Poronai (also spelled Horonai), approximately 53 miles inland in a westwardly direction from the fledgling city just being surveyed and laid out that was to become the present day Sapporo. In order to bring the extracted coal to the port of Otaru, close by Sapporo, the Kaitakushi decided to build a railway line from the Poronai coalmines to Temiya, a harbor adjacent to Otaru. As the Kaitakushi had agents in America recruiting advisors for its agricultural enterprises, and as the population in Hokkaidō was similar to the American West in being extremely sparse, it was felt that Americans might be successfully employed in advising on building the proposed Poronai Tetsudō. The choice was apt, as Americans had experience in building lines extremely cheaply in untamed regions such as the American West, where there was very sparse population (and revenues would naturally be expected to be very modest). The Kaitakushi representatives set about finding the appropriate American engineer to be engaged, and did their preliminary studies well, as they chose to approach the legendary Thomas Scott, soon to be president of what by then was the pre-eminent American line, the Pennsylvania Railroad. On hearing their request, Scott recommended to them one of his former staff engineers, Joseph Ury⁷ Crawford, who was overseeing construction of one of Scott’s railway projects in the then remote parts of Texas. Crawford accepted the offer from his new employers and, according to a diary entry of Purcell in the fall of 1878, was “coming out with a letter of introduction” to commence work on the line. He arrived shortly after Purcell’s diary entry and set to work in a manner that soon ingratiated him with his Japanese hosts.

When he arrived that fall, Crawford brought with him probably no more or no less experience that did many of his British contemporaries, but of course he was trained in the American school of railway building rather than the British and this naturally lead to differences in the railway he would build in Hokkaidō. Moreover, he understood implicitly that the railroad would have to be built cheaply; a concept that was too often lost on or disregarded by his British counterparts. This was not entirely unjustifiable. The British, having unquestionably the strongest capital wherewithal of the day, financed and built their railways much more like what one would expect today, and with much more generous financing available, a standard that would instantly have qualified as “top of the line” from opening day was expected. America, well into the years subsequent to the American Civil War, was a capital-poor country that simply didn’t have the funds to build on as grand and permanent a scale as its British cousin. Accordingly, starting with the first lines built in the 1830s, American railways were built very quickly and lightly: single tracked in the place of typical British double tracking, wooden crossties in lieu of the granite blocks favored by early British lines (later it would be found that wooden crossties were superior for keeping alignment and gauge and would be universally adopted), very light wooden trestles in place of proper brick or masonry bridges, miles of line that snaked around a hill the British would have tunneled through for the sake of obtaining a short, direct route were sometimes added to a route to avoid costly tunnels, station buildings that were often little more than wayside shacks made of board and batten rather than the work of an architect in stone, brick and decorative cast ironwork, steep gradients and sharp curvatures that saved on costly cuts and embankments but resulted in a line where speeds were severely restricted compared to British lines more suited to high-speed running. Compared to their British counterparts, many American railroads were constructed in a quick, slap-dash manner, “on the cheap.” One advantage of this method of construction of course lies in the fact that once the line was opened, development of the surrounding areas was, in an age where there was no competing form of land transport, almost invariably spurred if the proper cost analyses had been done, and the population around such lines grew, in turn leading to more demand and greater profits. On responsibly-managed American railroads (and by no means was the term responsibly-managed always fitting), such profits were available for reinvestment in upgrading the line with better stations, permanent bridges and tunnels, and better route alignments, with some stretches of track being quite quickly abandoned altogether in favor of costlier but straighter or less steep new route alignments as the finances of these new American lines permitted. This approach was exceptionally well-suited for Hokkaidō, where the population was sparse, and where settlement was just coming to be encouraged by the Japanese Government by offering incentives to settlers much in the same way that settlement of the American West was being encouraged by the US Government. Furthering the government’s policy of encouraging settlement of the region by Japanese from overcrowded areas of Honshū, the new railway would be required to carry settlers and their baggage who had obtained the proper governmental papers free of charge on their trip to settle new lands, much as American and Canadian railways offered special discounted “Immigrant Fares” to those settling in the untamed areas of western North America.

It would be hard to find a more archetypal representation of railway operations in Hokkaidō than this photo of a classic American Mogul pulling a Hokkaidō Tankō Tetsudō train, the first three cars of which are some of the gondolas used for coal hauls, but laden with pit props for the return journey back to the mines of the Poronai coalfield.

Because building of the Poronai Tetsudō was under the jurisdiction of the Kaitakushi, purchasing for the line was not subject to the same considerations and controls from the Railway Bureau in Tōkyō, and Crawford was allowed considerable leeway in his recommendation and selection of equipment. (Engineering, March 19, 1880 reports that Crawford was authorized to purchase the materials and stock for the line.) Crawford was of Scottish descent (his family having ancestral connections to Lauriston Castle near Edinburgh) but was evidently a true Pennsylvanian; raised in Philadelphia on a family estate in Fox Chase, where stood a house with thick stone walls which was said originally to have been a Swedish fort. He was a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania in 1862. Not surprisingly, his choices reflect a clear attachment to railway suppliers from his native state or nearby, but perhaps this is because those were the suppliers over which he held the most influence and from which he could expect the best prices. All the spikes of the initial order were supplied from Pittsburgh, the contract for the original four locomotives was awarded to the Porter locomotive works of Pittsburgh,⁸ one source reports that the rolling stock were built in York, Pennsylvania (almost certainly meaning they were Billmeyer and Small products) but this is un-substantiated. It is known as a matter of certainty that some members of the rolling stock were manufactured by Harland and Hollingsworth in nearby Wilmington, Delaware. Rather than buy rails at a higher price from Pittsburgh, however, Crawford apparently didn’t abide uneconomical or unscrupulous contract awards, and the rails were ordered from the UK. At that time, the US rail rolling industry was still not quite able to compete effectively with the British, and indeed, didn’t yet have the capacity to handle the US domestic demand. Initially, the line was laid with light (and cheaper) rail weighing 35 pounds to the yard, but eventually it was re-laid with 45 lb. rail. Later, as funds available from profits permitted the first cheaply built wooden trestles to be replaced with proper iron pre-fabricated bridges, they were supplied by Cofrode and Taylor of Philadelphia. The line was imbued with Pennsylvanian flavor, but for the fact that it was built to the Japanese standard gauge of 1067mm. (In fairness to the Pennsylvanian dominance, Porter, Billmeyer and Small, and Harland and Hollingsworth all were manufacturers that specialized in manufacturing narrow gauge equipment, so the choices were not completely parochial.) While the island of Honshū was one where the unmistakably clean design lines of British engineering were evident—rigid wheelbase plate-framed locomotives with their copper-capped chimneys, polished brass steam domes, and tasteful liveries built to the highest standards, equipped with vacuum brakes, buffers, hook-and-link screw couplers, rigid wheelbase passenger cars with compartments, short wheel-base four-wheel loose-coupled goods wagons, and high station platforms—in Hokkaidō the locomotives had diamond stacks, built-up bar frames, “cow-catcher” pilots in place of buffers, wagon-top boilers, the latest Westinghouse air brakes, and would eventually have knuckle couplers. The passenger cars and freight cars were long wheelbase cars riding on two trucks in classic American fashion, similar in appearance to all modern railway rolling stock. The passenger carriages were 40 foot in length (at the time the longest in Japan) and were 8 feet wide outside. They were admirably equipped with pot-bellied stoves for heating in the harsh Hokkaidō winters, and lavatories, an amenity that the European-inspired carriages of Honshū did not yet possess. The initial order was for eight: one first class car that would be used as a private car for high-ranking railway or government officials, two second class cars, three third class cars and two second class/baggage combination cars. The freight cars were the model of American simplicity: 56 box cars were rostered in 1894 and 520 flat cars with stake-pockets along the side into which plank sides and ends 1¾’ high were placed to convert them into gondolas for hauling the coal that was the principal reason for building the rail line in the first place: cheap, ingenious, and effective, but certainly not easy to unload, as they would have contained no trap doors to allow for gravity emptying, and would have had to have been unloaded shovelful by shovelful. In short, while the typical train and railway bridge of the day in Honshū would not have looked out of place on the Isle of Man, a typical train or bridge of the day in Hokkaidō would not have looked out of place in Colorado.

The pre-eminent station on Hokkaidō in Meiji times was undoubtedly Sapporo Station, shown here on a midsummer’s day in the early 20th century; a work full of high Victorian exuberance. Though the station has long since been replaced, a scaled down version has been replicated at the Historical Village of Hokkaidō outside Sapporo to serve as the visitors’ center.

Crawford rendered good service while in Hokkaidō before he returned home to the Pennsylvania Railroad, and did so with economy. The Emperor awarded him with the Order of the Rising Sun, Fourth Order on his departure. He was fondly remembered by the Japanese, much like Morel. But more pointedly, his watchful eye on the bottom line and sensitivity to economy were not forgotten by his former employer, and for the rest of his professional career Crawford would be called to act on behalf of the Japanese when needed. Thus began a life-long connection with the Japanese railway system once Crawford returned home in the US: being entrusted in 1896 to serve as a purchasing agent of the IJGR to purchase bulk orders of rails, and serving as consulting engineer in 1910⁹ for which he was further awarded the Order of the Sacred Treasure, Insignia of the Third Class. He was held in such esteem that five years after his death, his memory was honored with a bronze bust of his likeness along with similar busts of his Japanese counterparts in front of Sapporo station, dedicated on July 29, 1929.

Unlike some of the British yatoi, Crawford viewed his employment contract in Japan as a mere temporary assignment and not as a career. He came, he did his work, and at the end of his contract term, he simply went home. By the same token, when reading some accounts and passing comments made by the British yatoi and in the British engineering press of the day, one gathers that the British who came to Japan often did so hoping to have a lifelong or long-term career there, as in fact many did in India and other colonial possessions of the British Empire, for one sometimes reads polite lamentations over the Japanese policy of replacing the yatoi that had commenced already by the middle of the 1880s as the first Japanese who were qualified to replace them started to graduate from the Kōbudaigakkō. Crawford on the other hand made quick work of the Poronai Tetsudō. According to Engineering, within a year from receiving his order to start actual construction, he had supervised, taught, and tutored his Japanese subordinates to such a degree that they would be capable of finishing the line on his departure. The first segment, Temiya to Zenibaka (roughly halfway to Sapporo) was opened on November 11, 1880. One week later on the 18^th the line was opened to Karukawa, and the 23 miles of line between Otaru and Sapporo was opened on November 28, 1880. The line was said to be turning a daily profit before his contract ended and he returned home to further endeavors in America. Of course, all was not smooth sailing. For instance the bridge spanning the Toyohira river (as the line left the environs of Sapporo) had only been in place for a matter of days before it was carried away in severe flooding caused by run-off from melting snow in April 1882, which was a notable 7’ 7” above the previous high water mark.

In August 1881 the Emperor visited Hokkaidō and rode on the newly opened Poronai Tetsudō in its sole first class passenger car shown here, as no private Imperial carriage had been built or shipped over from Honshū for the occasion. The views are taken from a postcard issued on August 20, 1911 commemorating the 30th anniversary of that visit. The American origins of this particular car could not be more evident, including the “Horonai Railway of Hokkaidō” legend in “Railroad Gothic” lettering above the windows. The kanji Kaitakushi are painted on the center panel. The American coaches were radically different from the typical British carriage of the day in that they were all equipped with lavatories and coal burning stoves for heat. There appears to be no record of the Emperor’s reaction to what was probably the first trip of his life in an ordinary passenger car. The coach was probably originally painted a straw color and was only used by high railway or government officials. It was routinely kept stored in a Sapporo car barn for VIP use until transferred to the Transport Museum in Tōkyō in 1923 and is preserved there to this day. Note the elaborate decorative stenciling on the oilcloth ceiling.

Crawford’s approach and attitude to the building of the first line in Hokkaidō stood in sharp distinction to the building of the first line from Yokohama to Shimbashi, and Engineering, the pre-eminent trade publication of it’s day, took note of its progress in 1882:

“The line is from Otarunal [sic] Harbour, on the west coast, via Sapparo [sic], the capital, to the Paronai [sic] coalfields. It cost 4,000 l. per mile, which includes rolling stock, motive power, and machinery for terminal repair shops. An English line, formerly built between Tokio and Yokohama, cost nearly 40,000 l. per mile, and took five years to complete 18 miles. The new line is the first American railroad built in Asia.”

The comparison could not have been more glaring... under American supervision, the Poronai Tetsudō had been built at one-tenth of the cost of the Shimbashi line. In a diplomatic report to Washington, De Long’s successor John A. Bingham reported a slightly less favorable ratio of one-eighth the cost. Whatever the true amount, it was a harbinger of a trend: from that point forward until the latter years of Meiji, in the scramble for the business of selling locomotives and railway equipment, British builders were challenged by Americans, who gradually came to surpass and out sell them. The Poronai line subsequently was opened in its entirety in November 13, 1882 and it set the standard for future railway building on the island: Hokkaidō would be a place where American construction methods, operating procedures, and rolling stock would be adopted, which would continue even after September 1896, when jurisdiction over all railways in Hokkaidō was passed from the Kaitakushi to the Colonization Department in a jishin, at which point a law relating to future railway construction on the island was issued. For these reasons, railway development on Hokkaidō was always somewhat unique in Meiji Japan.

By 1887, Engineering News, an American competitor of Engineering noted with approval an editorial appearing in the “Jigi-Shimpo” newspaper (perhaps the Ōsaka Jiji Shimpo) which “advises the projectors ‘to adopt for their model the inexpensive railroads of the United States, which are constructed for their practical usefulness and not for the outward appearance’...” The Japanese editorial went on to point out that just because American-built lines cost four times less than English-built ones didn’t mean that English-built ones were four times better, and went on to remark that “it would be much better to have four miles of the American railroad than one mile of the more highly finished English article.” In a self-congratulatory tone, Engineering News attributed the Jiji Shimpo editor’s bias to the fact that building the Yokohama–Shimbashi line “English capitalists pocketed an amount of cash inordinately out of proportion to the work done and the Japanese have apparently have gained some experience which leads them to seek in other fields for their future railway builders.” Clearly, there would be competition to the British in furnishing locomotives and railway equipment in the future.

The Poronai Tetsudō was later sold to the coal mining venture at whose beds it terminated, and the company became known as the Hakkaidō Tankō Tetsudō Kabushiki Kaisha, the Hokkaidō Coal Mine and Railway Company, Inc. and as if anything Western embodied the spirit of modernism and advancement, its locomotives were frequently seen emblazoned with the Roman alphabet letters “H.T.T.K.K.”. It established a precedent among private railway companies in Japan of acquiring and conducting mining (and later) warehousing, carriage, and shipping businesses.

No work illustrating railways in Hokkaidō would be complete without a snow scene. Negotiating the approaches to Sapporo after a light snow is an American-built locomotive, probably a Mogul, at the head of a well-laden mixed train, a common practice in Meiji times on Hokkaidō. The two passenger cars can barely be discerned at the very rear of the train.

A contractor’s locomotive is seen here taking back to shore the truck on which was brought the large piece of prefabricated concrete block that is being lowered in place to build the breakwater designed to improve the Otaru harbor facilities. The silhouette of the diminutive tank locomotive leads one to suspect that perhaps it is one of the saddle tank 0-4-0Ts of the Avonside, Bagnall, Hawthorn Leslie, or Fox Walker Locomotive Works. The Otaru harbor project was commenced in 1897, dating this very rare photograph to around that time. The subject of contractors and industrial locomotives in Meiji Japan is little studied in English language works.

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On the mainland the Nakasendō Tetsudō Kosai bond issue had proven successful in raising the funds for the Nakasendō link but as work started in the most rugged mountain regions and as the opposing Takasaki and Naoetsu lines edged together towards a meeting there, the Railway Bureau came to realize that construction of a railway line through the roughest terrain would be inordinately difficult and costly. Initially, the large rivers that the alternative Tokaidō route crossed were seen as obstacles that would have required excessively costly expenditures in the form of imported foreign bridge components. It was hoped that the Nakasendō would alleviate this, as fewer and smaller rivers were crossed, if tunneling could be kept to a minimum. Yokokawa, at the foot of the Usui pass had been reached in 1885. As the two feeder lines mentioned previously and the bridgework beyond Ōgaki were in progress, final surveys of the Usui Pass route were completed in 1886 and unfortunately included a large amount of tunneling. According to Inoue, the resulting estimates showed that, with this tunneling, it would take ten years to complete the line via the Usui pass, at a cost of ¥100,000 per mile as compared to ¥70,000 per mile via the Tokaidō alternative.

Hakodate was the natural goal of railways on the island of Hokkaidō, being the closest possible town opposite Honshū that offered suitable port facilities in its harbor. Eventually, ferries would shuttle whole trains back and forth between this station and the mainland, but in this photo, a boat train waits pierside for an arriving passenger ship.

Two views of Hakodate station, town-side and track-side, as it appeared shortly after inauguration of services in 1904. The opening of this station provided the shortest feasible ferry link with the terminal of the Nippon Tetsudō across the Straits of Tsugaru at Aomori.

After Hakodate Station was opened in 1904, but before July 1911 when this postcard was mailed, Hokkaidō staged a Railway Exhibition, the entrance gate of which is shown here, before what may be the freight depot, where numerous sidings would have been more easily set aside for rolling stock displays. It is likely that this is one of the festivities that followed on the heels of the Russo-Japanese War. The ladder and bell structure to the right seems curious to Western eyes, but was a ubiquitous presence in every Japanese town of any size in Meiji times—a fire look-out and alarm bell—a cheap and indispensable neighborhood safety appliance at a time when almost all Japanese housing was constructed of wood and paper, with little setback between adjoining units.

Hokkaidō was always a bit of a special administrative region in Meiji times, and that distinctiveness also made itself felt in matters of railway organization. Perhaps this accounts for administrative offices (opened in 1916) such as these: a bit more imposing than might otherwise been expected for regional railway headquarters of the day.

The first section of the Hokkaidō Tetsudō, which was projected to run from Hakodate to a junction with the Hokkaidō Tanko Tetsudō at Otaru/Temiya, was opened in 1903 and included among the works a causeway across Lake Ōnuma, destined to become a part of Ōnuma National Park. With completion of the line to Otaru, the shortest feasible rail ferry service was inaugurated between Hakodate and Aomori on Honshū. In this view of the Lake Ōnuma causeway, a British Mogul E4 or 7700 Class steams by with a mixed train, while Mt. Komagatake looms in the background. The Hokkaidō Tetsudō’s mogul class was one of very few classes of Beyer-Peacock British-built locomotives to be used on Hokkaidō, which remained almost exclusively rostered with American locomotives until Japanese-built examples replaced them. Note the by-then quaint practice of locating the marker lamp at the side of the boiler rather than atop the buffer beam. This view became a favorite of photographers, and would be replicated on other occasions in other times with more modern locomotives.

A closer view of another E4 mogul at the head of a freight train as it comes off the causeway, posted on August 24, 1912 after nationalization. The route of the former Hokkaidō Tetsudō was almost from the moment of opening a busy one, as it was the most direct route for all goods and passengers bound for Honshū.

One scholar neatly summarized the situation that Japanese civil engineers faced:

“Owing to the character of the land (mountainous regions, possibility of earthquakes), railway substructures, as well as the superstructures, are very costly. The difference between different regions is very striking. Whilst in level regions the cost of railway construction amounts, on an average, to 70,000 yen per mile, the cost on some mountainous sections (for instance on the Chuo line) is as high as 250,000 yen per mile. Some of the railway bridges have cost as much as three million yen. The large number of tunnels and cuttings, as well as the necessity of constructing supporting walls in order to prevent the occurrence of landslides, combine to render the cost of construction of railway lines in Japan very high.”

The steep grades planned for the line would have rendered average speeds on the line intolerably slow, and in actuality there was little hope for any traffic to be generated along some parts of the route, with the exception of logs brought down from the mountains, whereas the Tokaidō route would run through the population centers of Nagoya, Shizuoka, and Hamamatsu, bringing with it the promise of much more significant traffic returns. Moreover the cost of operating locomotives along a mountainous line was significantly more than the operational costs of a coastal line. IJGR engineer Minami Kiyoshi (1856–1904), who conducted the first survey of the Usui line the prior year, had plotted a line with gradients of 1 in 10, which is far too steep for conventional railway operation. Minami recommended that on these gradients, a rope hauled “funicular style” railway, similar to those employed today for ski lift railways, be employed, which would of course have meant for slowness of operation as arriving trains on one side would have to be uncoupled from the locomotive, broken up, hauled over the incline in segments, let down the other side, and then re-formed into trains to be hauled on by a waiting locomotive from a stable that would have to be kept in waiting at the other side. Another alternative was to build a single line in series of “switchbacks”, formations of railway lines up the sides of the mountain in zigzag fashion that resembled a series of the letter “Y” laid on its side in ladder-like succession with the base of each “Y” forming a rung of the ladder pointing outwards, alternatively in opposite directions, requiring that trains reverse themselves back and forth and “switch back” above the line they had just ascended upon. As this was to be the principal railway line of the nation, the projections of the amount of traffic that would pass over these zigzags was substantial. Even before the railway, the pass was a major route for transporting rice and other staples from the hinterlands to Tōkyō, and some 300 people per day were making their way across it by foot, rickshaw, kago sedan chairs, or horseback. This fact made it clear that the result of building such a line would have lead to chaos.

Muroran was another of Hokkaidō’s ferry ports, much closer to the mainland than Otaru, from which one could depart to Honshū, and its station (opened in 1892) was larger than average perhaps to accommodate increased traffic levels because of this. The view here shows the station in the 1920s, when a local bus can be seen parked just beyond the main entrance in the station forecourt.

The safety, scheduling, and logistical disadvantages of either option were staggering from an operational point of view. Faced with these realities, the wishes of the military were overruled, and the decision was made in July 1886 to re-route the railway along the Tokaidō. Except for a detour over the Hakone Pass, the line roughly followed the original Tokaidō route as far as Nagoya, and thereafter took the ancient Minō-dō from Atsuta near Nagoya to Ōgaki. Despite the fact that the Tokaidō route to Ōgaki was 368 miles compared to 220 miles from Takasaki, there was a 13% savings in the total cost of construction, due to the fact that less of the line had to be built through mountainous terrain. Part of the savings was immediately earmarked for building a segment of the Kotō Line (East Lake Line) around the eastern shore of Lake Biwa to do away with the necessity of transferring loads and passengers from trains to lake steamers and back between Nagahama and Ōtsu. Even with the cost of the Kotō line added, the selection of the Tokaidō over the Nakasendō route amounted to a 10% savings, which made the decision to build a branch line from Ōfuna, a new station on the Tokaidō, to Yokosuka, then the most important naval base in the realm, much easier to make, and the additional branch that would greatly facilitate military supply was authorized in 1889.

The rail yards of the harbor proper are shown in this winter view of Muroran, which evidences its importance as a port in Meiji times. Between 1892 and completion of the Hokkaidō Tetsudō (linking Otaru with Hakodate) in 1905, Muroran was the closest port to Honshū served by Hokkaidō’s railway network. That period would be Muroran’s golden age for coal transfer and passenger ferry service.

When the first section of the IJGR-built Tokaidō line opened in 1889, it was operated with a fleet of British built 4-4-0 tender locomotives able to handle longer and heavier trains than the 2-4-0T and 2-4-2T tank locomotives that had hitherto been the typical IJGR locomotives used in the Tōkyō area. These new locomotives were part of a long line of British 4-4-0 tender locomotives that would dominate long-distance operations in Honshū for a decade, starting in 1883 when the first examples were imported for the Takasaki line. Shown here in a photo taken before 1904 is No. 639, one of the later such 4-4-0s, the D9 or 6200 Class, a Neilson product dating from 1897, handling a long train of 4-wheel stock. The location is unknown, but the station roofline visible above the third carriage leads one to suspect it may be Ōsaka Station.

The new route of the long-desired grand trunk line branched from the Shimbashi–Yokohama line just before Yokohama. A new station was built on the mainline near the junction, which became the present day Yokohama station. The original Yokohama station was renamed Sakuragicho. In 1887, only a year after the decision to stop work on the Nakasendō route, the westbound portion of the Tokaidō had worked itself westward to ‘Kodzu’ (as the Victorians often spelled the name of the town Kōzu), while the eastbound line from Ōgaki had reached Hammamatsu, leaving a gap of only 120 miles. (In this same year, the first mechanical interlocking signal device was installed at Shinagawa, a notable step towards introduction of safety measures to the system.) The remaining gap was closed on April 16, 1889, and with the completion of the Kotō rail section around the eastern shore of Lake Biwa, shortly thereafter, the disparate rail systems had been linked and Japan at last had a contiguous railway network. Just prior to the final completion of the line on July first 1889, Inoue met a number of his colleagues in Nagoya to celebrate the attainment of the 1,000 mile mark for Japan’s railway system.

Construction of the Tokaidō line went at a quicker pace than had been estimated. Perhaps this put the IJGR in the unenviable position of not having adequate coaching stock for the new line at a time when its shops were working to capacity, and undoubtedly the IJGR took the opportunity to evaluate foreign examples. The result was an order for 60 new passenger carriages from the United Kindgom placed so as to have adequate rolling stock on hand in time for the opening, based on an earlier 1875 non-corridor bogie stock design. The first bogie carriages imported from Britain in 1875 had no corridor connection between, or indeed even within them. Once a passenger was seated in a carriage compartment, he or she was obliged to stay there until the next station stop, as there was no means of walking to the next compartment or carriage. This design was copied by Shimbashi and Kōbe car-shops from 1876 to 1887. With the 1889 design, the carriages were at last updated to provide corridor communication within the carriage itself, but not between carriages. As these carriages were designed for long-distance services, they were also fitted with lavatories, the first such use beside the American-built passenger cars of Hokkaidō. The carriages ordered were equipped with the obligatory tropical double roof, ran on two four-wheel trucks, and were 46½ feet long—certainly longer than anything operating on Honshū at the time, and exceeding the American coaches of Hokkaidō, which up to that time had been the largest carriages operating in Japan. Originally, two lavatories were placed in the center of the body, one opening only to one side of the carriage, and the other opening only to the other side, effectively dividing the carriage into two large common compartments between which there was no means of communication. Later, these came to be placed at each end. Their introduction gave cause for further adjustment of the social customs of the day. Initially, the traveling public simply declined to use them while the train was underway, with the result being a mad rush during station stops, and the right-of-way at stations became unbearable for the stench. (The lavatories emptied directly onto the tracks below, as was often the case worldwide even into the 1970s.) A speedy public education campaign was put in place instructing the public that it was forbidden to use the lavatories while trains were stopped in stations or along stretches of line abutting populated areas.

Between October 21 and November 3, 1904 during the Russo-Japanese War some 35,000 soldiers and 5,000 horses of the Japanese Army’s 7th Division passed through Muroran on the way to the front where they would be decimated in the final assaults on the soon-to-be legendary 203 Meter Hill, the capture of which proved to be the key to the fall of the “Russian Gibraltar” at Port Arthur. Although undated, it is believed this photo shows part of those troops before that fateful encounter, with white rifles neatly stacked along the loading platform of the Muroran freight station, and gives a good view of a rather substantial freight station (by Meiji standards) built to withstand the harsh Hokkaidō winters and to accommodate the traffic associated with Muroran’s status as a port for transshipment of goods to and from Honshū. The horses have perhaps just been off-loaded from the train seen under the station roof.

The raison d’être for a railhead at Muroran is obvious in this photo, showing mound upon mound of coal in the sidings at right leading to the railway’s coal-loading pier that is just visible beneath the stamp. The coal has piled up apparently even before the station has been completely finished, evidenced by the fact that the station turntable in the foreground is still under construction. This would seem to date the photograph to around the time the station was nearing completion.

Dating from May 1888, this map shows the extent of the railway system as projected upon completion of the Tōkaidō main line between Tōkyō and Kyōto/Ōsaka, before the final segment around the eastern shore of Lake Biwa had been completed. The Nippon Tetsudō had reached Sendai to the north, while the San’yo Tetsudō had only reached as far as Himeji to the southwest. The only railways showing on Shikoku and Kyūshū are projected lines. The Poronai Tetsudō is the only railway on Hokkaidō.

From that point forward, two passenger carriage standards came to be used by the government car shops at Shimbashi, Kōbe, and Nagano: the first being a 23 foot long rigid wheelbase four-wheel compartment carriage, in the English style for short haul services (curiously, the 6-wheel carriage with axles at either end and one in the center that was in vogue in the UK and Europe at this time never gained any real currency in Japan, probably due to cost factors) and the second being the 46½ foot long pattern carriage (or subsequent variations) riding on two four-wheel trucks of 5 foot wheelbase to serve in long distance trains. The four-wheel design however entered into a period of very gradual eclipse. Although construction of 4-wheel carriages ceased in 1913 on government lines, as late as 1929, 30% of the coaching stock in Japan was of the 4-wheel variety. Were it not for their cheaper building costs, their day might have ended sooner. Japanese passenger cars during most of the Meiji era were thoroughly utilitarian vehicles, as would befit a developing economy. Most were painted and furnished very plainly; other than first class, even spartanly. It wasn’t until the final days of Meiji that this began to change.

The alignment of the Tokaidō line was such that it diverged from the original Shimbashi line just after Kanagawa, rendering the remaining portion of that line into Yokohama a branch. A new station for Yokohama was built on the line at what was then the north-eastern edge of town. Upon completion, the new station, shown here, took the name Yokohama, while the original Yokohama station was renamed Sakuragicho station, giving Yokohama the luxury of service from two stations, which was a rarity in Meiji Japan. Both stations were destroyed in the Great Kantō Earthquake of 1923.

Due to the narrowness of the car bodies necessitated by the narrower Japanese gauge, the seating arrangements of third class bogie carriages running on the IJGR and Kansai Tetsudō seem unusual by today’s standard. Either two long longitudinal banquette style bench seats ran the length of the car or normal transverse seating for two persons the entire length of the car along one side, an off-center aisle, (and because the car body was not wide enough) on the other side of which was one banquette style bench seat the whole length of the carriage. Passengers in Meiji Japan often rode facing sideways to the direction of travel. Foreign travelers of the day noted a curious design feature. The seats of these carriages were deeper than expected, in order to permit of sitting cross-legged fashion upon them, in the Japanese manner. To insure that passage down the walkway was not impeded, some carriages had a white line drawn on the floor, beyond which the passengers were forbidden to allow their feet to protrude, on pain of stern reprimand from the train crew. Both designs were crowned with the idiosyncratic Japanese double-roof to aid in cooling during the hot summer months. Due to the IJGR car shops initial hegemony in rolling stock building at the time, these two designs became the de facto standard for many private railways.

The Tokaidō line was completed on July first and ready for official inauguration in August, 1889. In officiating over the inauguration of the Tokaidō line, the Emperor was called upon to open what was probably the most important line of railway from that point forward until the opening of the Shinkansen (lit. “New Trunk Line”) high-speed service in 1964. At opening, there were a number of passenger trains daily along parts of the line, but only one through train each day in each direction that ran the entire length from Tōkyō Shimbashi to Kōbe. The trip along the entire 376 miles was scheduled at 20 hours and 5 minutes by that train.

This view, taken in the 1920s, shows the interior of a late-Meiji Japanese passenger carriage, probably second-class, with transverse seating due to the narrow loading gauge. Many of the cars were said to have had a white line along the floor, beyond which passengers were forbidden to allow their feet to protrude in order to keep the center aisle clear for passage.

With the opening of the Tokaidō line in 1889, the IJGR put into service a fleet of new passenger cars, 46½ feet in length, running on two four-wheel trucks or bogies for the long distance service, which became a standardized design. Shown here is the third class version of one of them, stopped at an unknown station on a brisk, sunny day, circa 1900. With the introduction of these carriages, the short-wheelbase 4-wheel British compartment car started into a gradual eclipse. Note lamp pots on the roof. Japanese coaching stock adopted the British practice of keeping lamps at stations, and at dusk, a man would walk along the roofs of a train stopped in a station, while another station hand with a cart of lighted lamps would throw them up to the lamp man, who would open the lamp-pot cover and lower them into the car below. The gentleman at far left in the bowler hat looking toward the camera is more likely than not William Barclay Parsons, father of the New York City subway system, as the photo is from his book An American Engineer in China.

The opening of the new line had a small indirect effect of assisting Japan in its efforts to revise the extraterritoriality treaties that had long been a bothersome issue in point of national pride as well as sovereignty. One of the terms the Shōgunal Government had succeeded in including in the extraterritorial treaties was a restriction designed to contain foreign presence and influence in the realm, by keeping strict controls on foreign residents. Foreigners were permitted to reside and move freely about only the treaty ports recognized under the treaty port system and Tōkyō, and were not allowed to travel in Japan beyond the treaty port limits (usually around a 25 mile radius) without what amounted to an internal passport, which necessitated application to and approval by the Japanese Government. With completion of the Tokaidō main line, the foreign community in Japan started militating with their respective ambassadors and consuls to reform the extraterritorial treaties to scrap this requirement, as they were unsure they would be permitted to travel on the new railway system beyond the bounds of the Treaty Ports, without the disliked internal passports. The inconvenience of this travel restriction gave Western governments an added, although slight, incentive to agree to negotiations with an eye to reform. The first foreign power to agree to treaty revision was the United States, which had signed a treaty agreeing to end the hated and heated concept of extraterritoriality on August 7, 1878, but it was by its terms to become effective only if other foreign powers followed the US lead. Sir Harry Parkes was soon ridiculing it and the British refused to entertain revision discussions, effectively killing the US treaty. It took the British another sixteen years to be convinced. The treaties that finally started the transition, with weight of both American and British backing, were concluded in 1894 and were to take effect in 1899, ameliorating an issue that had long been a sticking point domestically among the Japanese.

Chigasaki station and town were located on the Tōkaidō main line, at roughly the mid-point between Yokohama and Odawara, where the line met and followed the coastline. In this view, a long freight train drawn by a British-built 4-4-0 ambles slowly into the station, while the station staff are seemingly more intent on posing for posterity than attending to the imminent arrival of the new train. The scene probably dates from the mid 1890s to around the time of Nationalization in 1906.

The artist J. Takahashi probably painted this view of Ōiso station on the IJGR’s Tokaidō line sometime in the 1890s. Ōiso is along the shore after the Tokaidō line leaves the vicinity of Enoshima on its approach to Mt. Fuji and was a town where a number of the political élite had second homes in Meiji times. Even relatively small stations in Meiji times could be built with a pedestrian overbridge if they were of a size large enough to merit two platforms.

The builder’s photo of a D9 Class locomotive prior to the 1909 renumbering when the 6270 Class designation was assigned to it, painted in photographic grey to show the lining style in which the locomotives were delivered. The D9/6270 Class was introduced in 1900 and with the 6200 class had 5’ ¾” driving wheels; among the largest of any British locomotives then in Japan. The box on the side of the boiler at the firebox is a patented invention of Dugald Drummond of the London and South Western Railway, to allow for a more efficient water-tube firebox. In the end, the increased maintenance costs necessitated by the device (in order to clean the tubes, the side panels had to be removable, resulting in chronic leakage, gasket problems and constant maintenance and adjustments) did not outweigh the fuel savings, the device fell into disuse, and the class was fitted with conventional boilers.

Seen here slogging up the 1 in 40 grade to the Hakone Pass on the original alignment of the IJGR’s Tokaidō Line is a Rogers-built Mogul 2-6-0 bought for use on the Hakone Pass segment of the line. The locomotive is one of the 1897 E6 or 7950 Class, although the running number is illegible. Although Hokkaidō had long been the province of American moguls, where they were used almost exclusively, the IJGR introduced them to traffic on Honshū starting in 1890. With the opening of the Tanna Tunnel cut-off in 1934, this portion of the line would become known as the Gotemba line, after the principle town and station through which it ran. The height of the steam column exhausting from the chimney is indicative of a locomotive being worked all-out to climb the grade.

A typical IJGR passenger train consisting of much more modern coaching stock around 1903–1904 having just passed Mt. Fuji, barely visible in the background and shrouded in mist behind the darker peak just right of center. The scene is somewhere near Okitsu at the mouth of the Okitsu river on the line’s approach to Shizuoka. Note the white stripe along the waistline of the second carriage, identifying it as a first class vehicle. The locomotive is most likely one of the Dubs-built 6270 or D9 Class of 1900.

The Tōkaidō main line skirted the temple precincts of the Seiken-ji temple near Okitsu, in Shizuoka Prefecture. The town became a celebrated winter resort with prominent Japanese. In this view a short passenger train piloted by an unidentified 4-4-0. Warning signs mark the crossing that provided access to a stone stairway leading up to the temple that is not visible in this view.

This IJGR express train is headed by what is probably a Schenectady-built D-12 class 4-4-0 as it steams past Fuji seen at Iwabuchi in this view from the turn of the 19th-20th Centuries.

Growing crops are indicative of midsummer in this view of a passenger train of 4-wheel stock steaming past Mt. Fuji on the Tōkaidō line.

Another classic view of a train with a British 4-4-0 and some of the earliest IJGR corridor stock introduced around the turn of the century. The view is taken from the mouth of the Numagawa river.

The IJGR’s Tokaidō mainline is shown here later, after the segment shown has been double tracked with Mt. Fuji looming in the background. An unidentifiable mixed train steams past some of the local farmland. This hand-colored scene, from an old glass transparency, probably dates from the closing years of the Meiji reign.

Of course, the opening of some 300 miles of new railway line necessitated not just rolling stock, but also additional locomotives to operate on it. British locomotive builders were at this time fast approaching the limits of their capacity. Order books were full or close to full, backlogs were beginning to be increasingly frequent, and delivery times were suffering. For British locomotive manufacturers, their reputation of building a product that was unrivalled worldwide had hitherto not seriously been challenged, and British builders had enjoyed a de facto monopoly on the Japanese locomotive market in Honshū, while the American builders enjoyed a similar situation in Hokkaidō. Indeed, Japanese locomotive orders were keeping some British builders quite busy: Nasmyth, Wilson for one, which provided many of the ubiquitous A8 class locomotives. Japanese purchases from that firm, although they only spanned a 22-year period from 1886 to 1908 when the last order was placed, accounted for no less than fifteen percent of the total output of locomotives for the firm’s entire 100-year history of locomotive production (1838–1938). For Nasmyth, Japan was second only to India as its largest customer. British locomotive builders were in their golden days, so much so that within a few years, due to the backlog of orders on their books, even British railways (many of which built their own locomotives, but who’s erecting shops were similarly backlogged with build orders) would be obliged to turn to American builders such as Baldwin and Schenectady for new locomotives—something unheard of—as the typical American locomotive of the day was viewed by British railway men and mechanical engineers as sub-standard and had a reputation for being cheaply built and not as durable as British locomotives. No self-respecting British railway of that time would have condescended to buy American locomotives, in absence of business exigencies. Those who did, did so because their traffic demands were burgeoning and British builders simply couldn’t produce locomotives in time to meet the demand. Such circumstances were just starting to exhibit themselves in 1889, when new locomotives were considered for the Tokaidō line. In 1890 the first American locomotives came ashore on both Honshū and Kyūshū, sporting buffers, vacuum brake gear, and screw-link couplers in place of a “cow-catcher” pilot, Westinghouse air-brakes, and knuckle couplers; the first American locomotives in Japan outside Hokkaidō. The IJGR had purchased some 2-6-0 Moguls that became Class E3 (8150 in the 1909 renumbering) and some of the new private railways had both ordered Baldwin 2-6-2T tank locomotives (Class 3300 in the 1909 scheme), the first of which came ashore in the same year. British locomotive builders no longer had the Japanese mainland as their exclusive market.

The region between Nagoya and Ōsaka was the center of the Kansai Tetsudō’s activities, and when it completed its route between the two in 1898 as a result of building and merger, it provided the IJGR with its first real competition, as the Kansai’s route was also shorter. It became a kind of “people’s choice” vehicle through which dissatisfaction with government policies could be channeled. Political symbolism aside, the dozen class members of this Dubs-Kansai loco is built not exactly the standard government fare either. The protective cab extension over the tender is unusual among any locomotives running in Japan in that day and must have come as a welcomed feature to the fireman in inclement weather. Unusual too is the wheel arrangement under the tender. This “1+truck” configuration of one fixed forward axle and a truck under the rear is the wheel arrangement that the vast majority of American tender locomotives in Japan sported. Most British tender locos had six wheel rigid plate-frame tenders. On nationalization the class would be designated 7850.

Due to backlogs in the British locomotive building industry and high cost of its products, by 1890 the IJGR was ready to buy locomotives from America. Hokkaidō would no longer be the sole territory for American rolling stock. Although the British were quick to point out that the American locomotives were not built as solidly and to as high a standard as the competing British offerings, the cheaper price and faster delivery time appealed to the cost-conscious Japanese and despite their reputed shortcomings, American locomotives were soon outselling their British counterparts. 1897 saw the importation of the Brooks-built D11 or 5160 Class locomotives with 4 ½’ drivers for mixed traffic, two of which are shown in these photographs. Curiously, these locomotives were built with a British style six wheel rigid-frame tender. The latter locomotive shows exhaust while at rest, which evidences the lively blower setting used to stoke its fire just after a fireman has added coal while stopped at a station platform.

These photographs show the IJGR station at Nagoya in the year it opened (1886) and after its rebuilding following the 1891 earthquake, which was particularly strong in the Nōbi Plain where Nagoya is located. The station itself was one of the hardest hit during the quake and rebuilding of the station structure was one of the last things accomplished relative to bridge repair and restoring the IJGR Tōkaidō Line to operational status. As electric trolley cars were not introduced in Nagoya until 1898, the second scene would date from sometime subsequent to their inauguration. Kabuto Biru (Kabuto is a samurai helmet and Biru, of course, is beer) is prominently advertised on the sign in the station forecourt in the second view and was introduced the same year. The brand disappeared around WWII, but has recently been re-introduced in the Nagoya area. The passengers’ footbridge is just visible behind the end of the station veranda at the right. Note also the archetypical koban police box at the foot of the billboard.

A fine view of a late-Meiji freight train, perhaps piloted by an Schenectady or Rogers 4-4-0, on the Abe-kawa bridge near Shizuoka with Fuji in the background.

This photograph shows a train of four-wheel coaching stock storming through a station. It is known that the train is an IJGR train, but the location was not recorded. It was taken sometime before 1904. The locomotive appears to be a member of the Baldwin D8 or 6150 class introduced in 1897, identifiable by their telltale Baldwin-design steam and sand domes. With drivers measuring 5’ 1”, they were the largest drivers in use in Japan when introduced. Note the lone horse box standing in the station bay, a car for transporting horses with drop-side doors, suitable padding to protect valuable horses from undue injury, feed bins, and a small compartment at one end for the grooms; another adoption of British designs.

When the Kansai Tetsudō reached Nagoya in 1898, it realized that it had to gain market share from the IJGR between there and Ōsaka, and given the shorter route mileage it possessed, it was clearly in a position to do so. Not content to rely strictly on the shorter route, the Kansai ordered a series of nine 4-4-0 two-cylinder compound locomotives from the Pittsburgh Locomotive Works with 5’ 2” drivers, the largest ever used in Japan on a 4-4-0 locomotive, for their main line services. These locos were designed for speed to outclass the locomotives then handling IJGR Tōkaidō Express trains. The Class was dubbed the Hayate “Fast Wind” Class, which became the 6500 Class on nationalization. On the eve of nationalization in 1906, the Kansai ordered an additional 12 updated versions from Pittsburgh’s successor Alco, and called them the Oite “Tailwind” Class; all the more fitting due to the imminent nationalization. One of the members of the Oite class is shown in this view. The “1+truck” tender wheel arrangement was by far the most common one on all the American-built tender locomotives imported to Japan. The size of the drivers of these two Kansai classes would not be exceeded until the very last foreign 4-6-0 and 4-6-2 locomotives were imported in 1911.

The second Ōsaka Station is shown in this view. The Neo-Classic French inspired structure replaced the original Ōsaka Station (shown elsewhere) in 1901. The Ōsaka Municipal Railway was opened in 1903. Shortly thereafter, one of its trolleys was captured speeding by as a rickshaw runner ambled past the porte-cochere to park among the other runners. Ōsaka station by this time had acquired a secondary name of Umeda, from its surrounding neighborhood, to distinguish it from the Ōsaka station belonging to the Kansai Tetsudō at Minatomachi.

The IJGR’s response to the Kansai challenge was to order 30 locomotives in1902 to complete with the Hayate class. The IJGR designated them as the D12 class (6400 class in 1909). Number 671 of that class is shown here. Their 5’ ¾” driving wheels were the second largest on the IJGR at the time and were made for speed. It was an era when the public worldwide was enthralled by and had become accustomed to railway speed competitions, such as the so–called Great Race to the North in the UK between rival railways and the Twentieth Century Limited–Broadway Limited competition in the US. The Nagoya–Ōsaka stretch was one of the few places in Japan where any comparable competition could take place. The Kansai expresses were scheduled to complete their runs in 20 minutes less time than their IJGR rivals, which must have put these IJGR locomotives to their paces.

Ōsaka station from the yards in late Meiji, facing the direction of Kōbe, taken roughly from the point where the entrance to the freight sidings diverges to the right of the main line. This busy view makes an interesting comparison to the view of the station shortly after it opened shown earlier. Traffic continued to increase after the 1901 configuration such that by the 1920s, thoughts were being given to another rebuild and reconfiguration of the station and platform arrangements.

A view of an IJGR express train making its final approach to Sannomiya Station in the vicinity of Kōbe with a mixed lot of coaching stock in the earlier times when the right-of-way crossties or sleepers were kept covered in ballast. Compare with the ballasting in the later Sannomiya departure scene shown on the opposite page.

The signals are off as an IJGR Kōbe-bound passenger train is seen leaving Nada. As the train appears to be on a slight upgrade, but only smoke, not steam is seen exhausting from the locomotive (possibly an IJGR 6400 class 4-4-0), one assumes it is a hot, humid, hazy day. Nada is on the IJGR line between Ōsaka and Kōbe, just prior to Sannomiya, and the surrounding area has long been noted for producing exceptionally fine sake. In 1905, with the opening of the Hanshin Denki Tetsudō, an all-electric railway between Ōsaka and Kōbe, Iwaya would become the name of the competing station next to Nada, where the lines ran parallel. Soon the clean, silent electric trains of the newcomer would be proving stiff competition for the sooty steam-hauled government trains.

Sannomiya Station was one of the original stations on the Kōbe–Ōsaka line, and was probably around 20 years old when this photograph was taken. The local rickshaw runners waiting for the next arrivals pass the time with a smoke as three maids pass by in a scene evocative of Gilbert and Sullivan. The foreign settlement was centered around Sannomiya, and many an unseasoned Western tourist bought through tickets for Kōbe, only to learn on arrival that the hotel where reservations had been made was situated one station back the line.

By late in the Meiji reign, the locomotives that had served for primary duties but had been rendered unfit for such trains due to increasing train weights and distances were relegated to local, branch line, so-called “pick-up freight”, or yard duties. Two such examples are shown here leaving the station yard in Kōbe, which lies just beyond the bridge. To the left, what appears to be one of the first 2-4-0T tank engines (possibly bearing running number 4 on its smoke box door under the pre-1909 numbering scheme), which appears to be stopped with a short train of one boxcar and a brake van. The other (possibly number 103), running through with a short train of 4 plank open wagons, is one of the popular A8 class. The location is at the Aioibashi (the bridge spanning the lines) in the heart of Kōbe. Were it not for the line of rickshaws parked behind the wall at the far right and the slightly awkward cupola on the local corner shop, the scene might be mistaken for one in any large city in the north of England.

This photograph shows one of the long-lived B6 Class locomotives (Classes 2100, 2120, 2400, and 2500 under the 1909 scheme) as built. The B6 was by far the most numerous class of its time (no less than 528 were built) and came to replace the lighter A8 class as the workhorse of mid-Meiji railways in Japan. They served on passenger and freight trains alike, on both branch line and main line duties. They were built by Dubs, Sharp Stewart, North British, Henschel, Hannover, Schwarzkopff, Baldwin, and Kōbe Shops. This particular example is one of the Hannover class members. Dubs built the bulk of the class at 268 members. Except for the boiler-mounted (forward) sand dome and the air compressor behind the chimney, the locomotive has a typical British appearance.

A IJGR down train departing Sannomiya Station for Kōbe (the next station) probably in the early 1900s. The flat topped steam dome and sand dome with the running board flush with the top of the slide valve chest identifies this locomotive as a D11 or 5160 Class American-built Brooks 4-4-0. These classes were introduced in 1897. The red stripe along the train side indicates it consists of third class carriages. Box cars are unloading at the freight station to the left of the main line. Barely visible in the foreground are crossing guard’s or switchmen’s huts, another British convention.

Once it became apparent that the government was adopting the policy of authorizing private joint-stock companies to build and operate railways, schemes started to be proposed that were not only for grand-scale trunk lines such as the Nippon, but also for small branch or feeder lines. The New York Times noted as early as August 7, 1881 that even Buddhist monks from one locality were actively helping to promote an extension of the railway from the Tsuruga terminal northeasterly to Kanazawa, which would have benefited pilgrimage traffic to their temples. Another proposal was for a line to be named the Hankai Tetsudō from Ōsaka southwards to Sakai, a distance of only 7 miles. It was authorized in 1884, and would have been of little historical significance were it not for bargain equipment and materials in the form of the abandoned stock of the Kamaishi railway which the promoters had snapped up at used prices, and brought to Ōsaka. With the failure of the Kamaishi railway, its equipment had been on the used equipment market. The locomotives, rolling stock, rails, and railway related plant such as turntables were dismantled, and the lot was shipped to Ōsaka. (The Hankai bought only two of the three Sharp-Stewart tank locomotives: the other was bought by the Mitsui Company’s Miike coal mine railway.) The Hankai line was a passenger carrying line, and was an unqualified success, soon grossing more revenue per route mile than any other railway in the realm, although it was less than seven miles long. Its success was largely due to the fact that its route passed close-by Sumiyoshi Temple, one of the great tourist and pilgrimage destinations of the area and by the end of 1896 was carrying 1,100 passengers per route-mile per day. Two new locomotives were hurriedly ordered from Germany. Unfortunately, the Hankai gave rise to an entire system of narrow-gauge railways in the Ōsaka vicinity, raising the spectre of all the evils and inconveniences associated with a break of gauge and a dual gauge railway system. Thus on completion of the tiny Hankai, the seeds were sown for a dual-gauge system of railways around Ōsaka, which exists to this day.

Around the time that the Hankai Tetsudō was in its first years of operations, the government’s construction of the Nippon Tetsudō line had edged its way northward from Utsunomiya, past Shirakawa, to Koriyama, then Fukushima, and had reached Sendai, a major northern city, a distance of 217 miles. The line was opened to Sendai in 1887 and thereafter work was pushed northwards to Aomori.

On other fronts, in 1888 a charter was granted for a railway to run a trunk line southwesterly from Kōbe, where it had been granted running powers over the approach to the IJGR station, to the port of Shimonoseki at the very southern tip of Honshū. The railway was named the San’yo Tetsudō. San’yo is a term borrowing from the Chinese philosophical concept of Yin and Yang meaning roughly “the Yang [i.e. sunny] side of the mountains” and is the name of the geographical region of the Honshū seaboard southwest of Ōsaka/Kōbe which borders the Inland Sea. In terms of route miles, the new undertaking was on roughly the same order of magnitude as the Nippon Tetsudō. Both the Nippon and the San’yo were destined to be among the largest railways in the realm. Both served to link the growing IJGR network that stretched from the Kansai to the Kantō region railway network with the planned railway networks of Hokkaidō and Kyūshū respectively. The San’yo however ran through one of the most populous areas of the realm (while the Nippon’s territory was less populated) and served as a link to Kyūshū, also a heavily populated region, at a time when Hokkaidō was sparsely populated frontier.

This and the following two views trace the gradual development of the IJGR and the city itself in the Aioibashi area in Kōbe, as seen from the Aioi bridge. This early view probably dates from the late 1870s, when the neighborhood was essentially residential, the city had yet to be electrified, and the only overhead lines to be seen were the railway telegraph, with a pole sporting a traditional lotus bud finial (a quaint but unnecessary luxury). Notice the trailing crossover configured for left-hand running in the British fashion, the unpainted board and batten roof on the switchman’s hut in the bottom left, and again the ballasting and ballast profile that approach utter perfection. The steeply pitched roof of the Zenpuku temple can be seen to the right of the telegraph pole.

In this intermediate photograph, a mixed train headed by a neat British locomotive steams its way along the same stretch of track in a busier time of later Meiji, probably the late 1890s. Note the appearance of electric lines in comparison to the foregoing photograph and the wooden semaphore signals perched on a very high signal post to enable them to be seen over rooftops from well back along the curvature of the line. The station approach has become quadruple-tracked by this point. The locomotive carries running number 44 on the smokebox, and in profile is easily identifiable as one of a small class of six Kitson-built 4-4-0 tender locomotives of 1876 vintage (designated Class 5130 in 1909); copies of the 4-4-0 re-builds of the first Kitson 0-6-0 tank locomotives.

Finally, this view shows Aioicho-dori (dori means street), most likely in the years just prior to Nationalization in 1906, as a cut of San’yo Tetsudō boxcars (with that line’s distinctive twin mountain mon on the door sides) are shunted past by a small American-built tank locomotive. By this time the electric lines have proliferated, the neighborhood has taken on a distinctly commercial flavor, and the fencing of houses seen in the first photo has disappeared as all the housing has been re-oriented to face the street and has largely been converted to commercial use. Development can be seen creeping up the side of the distant mountain range. Kōbe station itself was located just behind the bridge on which the photographer stood to take this photograph.

Kōbe marked the end of the IJGR Tokaidō line and was the start of the San’yo Tetsudō. During building of the Kōbe–Kyōto line, Kōbe served as the national headquarters of the Railway Bureau. At the time of this view, sometime around the turn of the 19th-20th centuries, the station building had been enlarged. Rickshaws were a common sight outside every station in Meiji Japan. Note the rickshaw runner performing a wheel repair in the lower left corner.

A fuller view of Kōbe Station, with a puff of steam from a passing train seen in the background. The prominent pediment over the main entrance, centered between its two wings of office blocks, is a distinct feature of the neighborhood in these views, echoing the massive Georgian revival pediment of Waters’ Takebashi Barracks in Tōkyō, completed around the time Kōbe station was first opened.

The San’yo could rightly claim to be the “great connecting link” of the Empire, and did so in its promotional material. It had the good fortune of having for its first president the dapper Nakamigawa Hikojiro, nephew of Fukuzawa Yukichi, the founder of Keiogijuku (present day Keio) University. Nakamigawa was a foresighted president, who very early on realized that the San’yo was destined to form the southern third of the national trunk line (along with the Nippon Tetsudō and the IJGR Tokaidō line) that was slated to run the length of Honshū. Being cognizant of that destiny, Nakamigawa never shrank from building bridges and acquiring right-of-way for the day when double tracking would be needed, and insisted his line be built with no tight curves and easy grades with an eye toward the day when speed would be paramount in running and heavy traffic volumes would prevail. Additional expense was encountered due to the surveyed route that hugged the coast wherever possible such that, “for miles upon miles it [the railway line] has to be protected from the dashing waves by solid walls of stone” as a San’yo brochure put it. Nakamigawa didn’t shrink from those, or other costs: he bought the best British and American locomotives in adequate amounts against the day the San’yo would assume it’s great connecting link role. Unfortunately, his fellow officers and board members were not as far-sighted, and objections were raised to the grand style in which Nakamigawa was building the railway and buying locomotives. There was a parting of ways, with Nakamigawa stepping down from the presidency (although remaining on the board) in 1891, and the shortsighted board thereupon embarked upon selling its excess stock of locomotives to other new private railways that were getting underway. Nakamigawa went on to save the then-ailing Mitsui business conglomerate from financial difficulty, putting in place a turn-around scheme that would pave the way to its becoming one of Japan’s largest corporate conglomerates. His vision while president of the San’yo was vindicated within 5 years when the economic boom that followed on the heels of the Sino-Japanese War found the San’yo in short supply of locomotives and rolling stock and forced to repurchase some of the very items its board had sold earlier at nearly double the price. But that jumps ahead of the story: for the time being, the San’yo concentrated on its first segment, Kōbe Hiogo to Himeji, a distance of 34 miles, which was opened to traffic in 1888. By the end of 1889, it was possible to travel by uninterrupted rail line from Shiogama, a port on the Matsushima Bay slightly north-east of Sendai on the Nippon Tetsudō, to Tatsuno station, on the other side of the Ibo River about ten miles west of the old castle town of Himeji on the San’yo Tetsudō.

The extreme narrow gauge of the track in this photograph is obvious confirmation that the subject right-of-way belongs to the 838 mm gauged Hankai Tetsudō. This early view shows the entrance to the line’s Namba terminal, located just beyond the footbridge, behind the large tree. The photograph was taken sometime between opening of the line in 1885 and 1890. Hankai is a portmanteaux word derived from splicing the last character of Ōsaka (using the Chinese pronunciation Han) together with the character for Sakai, its southern terminus, which could also be pronounced kai. The seven-mile-long line ran between the two towns using equipment purchased second-hand from the ill-fated Kamaishi steel mill railway. In 1898 it became part of the Nankai Tetsudō, which escaped nationalization in 1906 and still uses the Namba terminus site to this day.

The town of Koriyama is roughly mid-point of the Nippon Tetsudō mainline between Utsunomiya and Fukushima, and its station, shown here, is a fairly representative example of a typical Nippon Tetsudō station. The station makes a good specimen of a small town station against which to compare the earlier view of Kanzaki station. The IJGR builders have learned well how to economize. Compared to the British-influenced Kanzaki, there is not a brick to be found: the station and its subsidiary buildings, the pedestrian overbridge, and even the platform walls appear to be constructed from wood. Although opened in 1887, only thirteen years after Kanzaki, the station clearly manifests the intervening radical re-alignment of spending priorities.

The Nippon Tetsudō reached the important regional city of Sendai in 1887 where outlay for a more expensive structure was justified, and the eventual result was this handsome station. The company’s mon has been used to form the three oculus roundels under the gables. Judging from the presence of numerous horses, closed carriages in the busy station forecourt, this view was taken in late Meiji.

The dashing and far-sighted Nakamigawa Hikojiro served as the first President of the San’yo Tetsudō. To him is due much credit for building the San’yo to a higher standard than many other railways of its day and in creating the culture of innovation for which the San’yo became known. As a youth, Nakamigawa had studied for an extended period in England, and came away with a much deeper understanding of railway design and of the relative importance of his line than some of his contemporaries. His insistence that grades in excess of 1 in 100 be avoided if at all possible earned him the nickname of “One Percent” among soon-to-be exasperated directors and shareholders who would have preferred cheaper construction shortcuts.

On the island of Shikoku, a small railway was started on October 28, 1888 from Iyo to Dogo, the first on the island of Shikoku, using a locomotive built by Krauss of Germany. For this line, and many other short rural or light railway lines in Shikoku and Kyūshū, German 762 mm or 1067 mm gauge 0-4-0T tank locomotives were used. A German engineer, Hermann Rumschöttel, was employed by the President of the fledgling Kyūshū Tetsudō, reputedly due to the notable success the Prussian railway systems were said to have achieved in supporting the Prussian Army during the Franco-Prussian War. Even to the Japanese used to smaller narrow gauge trains of the day, the railways in Shikoku, and the Iyo Railway in particular, seemed like toy trains with their tiny German 0-4-0T tank engines and passenger cars no longer than a typical four wheel European box car of the time. The famed novelist Natsume Soseki described a thinly veiled fictional counterpart of an Iyo Tetsudō train in his seminal 1906 novel “Botchan,” perhaps of equivalent stature in Japanese literature to “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” in American, as consisting of a carriage “about the size of a matchbox.”

Proud as the San’yo was of its highly scenic route that skirted the Inland Sea along much of its way, management couldn’t afford to risk disappointing tourist expectations by not including Mt. Fuji—which was not even remotely near the railway—on the front cover of its brochure. When London’s Moore’s Monthly Magazine (as The Locomotive Magazine was then known) received its complimentary copy of this pamphlet, its editors’ national pride was wounded by the decidedly glowing terms in which the line described its latest service improvements—all of which were American-inspired. The magazine had the last word and ran a feature in a subsequent issue that was a trifle indignant in tone, implying that it was a mystery why the railway had even bothered to put a British-built A8 type tank locomotive on its cover if it was seemingly so pro-American. The petty, chiding recriminations that were traded back and forth between the British and the American railway press of the late 19th century seems amusing by modern standards, but it was symptomatic of a very robust and earnest competition between the two economies for railway export business in that era. For its part, the San’yo never really considered itself to be unfavorably disposed to British practice or equipment, but simply was choosing the best from both worlds as it saw fit.

Pictured here is the first San’yo Tetsudō Terminal building at Hyogo, opened on November 1, 1888 when the San’yo began its inaugural services to nearby Akashi. It would not be until September 1, 1889, almost a year later, that the San’yo would close the short gap between its terminal and the IJGR railhead at Kōbe, linking the two railways.

Pride of the San’yo Tetsudō, its Shimonoseki Express, is seen here in an officially posed photograph from before nationalization in 1906. The locomotive is one of the San’yo Railway’s Baldwin-built 4-4-0 locomotives (later IJGR 5900 class), among the fastest in its roster. Express trains such as this were to launch the first era of Japanese railway innovation and improvement, which would gradually effect government and other lines throughout the realm. Note the distinctive San’yo pattern open air platform coaches visible in this and the next photograph.

This map is taken from the San’yo English language travel pamphlet. The San’yo route is depicted as the boldest of all railway lines seen. At the time of publication, the railway had reached Mitajiri, which dates the map to around 1898. The remainder of its projected route is shown in a dotted line. A connecting ferry from Hiroshima to Iyo on Shikoku is shown as having been in service by that time. Curiously, the map completely neglects to depict the Nippon Tetsudō mainline north through Utsunomiya.

According to a notation on its back, this photograph shows Kōbe Station on November 27, 1905, although perhaps is it one of the smaller stations farther along the line. A San’yo train for Shimonoseki is about to depart as a station staffer and all but two of the passengers and train crew focus on the foreign tourist who took this snapshot, perhaps wishing he or she would stop dawdling and board, so as not to delay departure. Western tourists to places outside major population centers that had become accustomed to foreigners were often the subject of intense scrutiny and unrelenting curiosity in Meiji Japan; their every movement watched. This phenomenon is often mentioned in passing in published travel accounts. Some Western visitors came to feel as though they were oddities on display and found the experience to be quite disturbing.

A San’yo train pulled by an American-built 2-6-2T tank locomotive, more likely than not a Baldwin product and probably a member of what would become IJGR 3300 class upon nationalization, seen on the San’yo Tetsudō mainline at Maiko in the late 1890s or early 1900s. By the time of this photograph, the San’yo had double tracked only a short amount of line, starting from Kōbe. Many of this type of locomotive were ordered straight from the builder’s locomotive catalogue, without significant modification, in order to keep purchase price to a minimum. Baldwin exported more locomotives to Japan than any other single foreign manufacturer by far.

The San’yo Tetsudō’s Maiko section as a train skirts the shore. Numerous people are on the beach in this view as this express, piloted by No. 20, a British-built 4-4-0, storms by. That the locomotive still bears its San’yo Tetsudō running number would seem to indicate that the photograph pre-dates the 1906 nationalization.

The San’yo’s station in the thriving regional town of Okayama was opened on March 18, 1891, and was larger than the average station in view of Okayama’s regional importance and population. This view shows the station and surrounding forecourt area probably just after the turn of the 20th century.

Shimonoseki was the terminal of the San’yo Tetsudō at the southern tip of Honshū, where this picturesque station structure was built virtually at pierside. The final section to Shimonoseki was inaugurated in 1901, when the station was opened. Ferry service across the Kanmon Straits to Moji, where the Kyūshū Tetsudō had already arrived, served as the link to Kyūshū.

One of the first stations west-bound trains came to on the San’yo line after leaving Kōbe was the sea-side station of Maiko, shown here with an American-built Mogul pulling in with a train of clerestory coaching stock. The sandy nature of the soil and the wind-gnarled pine trees are indicative of the shoreline, which is no great distance from the station.

The San’yo Tetsudō’s segment to Onomichi, in the former Bingo province, was opened on November 3, 1891. The town’s famed Jodoji Temple, founded during the reign of Prince Shotoku (574–622 AD), and its two-storey pagoda, a listed National Treasure, are visible here. This photograph must have been taken shortly after opening of the extension, as the embankment sod doesn’t quite look completely “grown in.” The scenic beauty of the San’yo’s Inland Sea coastal route is readily evident in this view.

A typical San’yo express train passes over the Ashida River bridge in this view. The river passed through the town of Fukuyama, between Okayama and Onomichi on the San’yo mainline to Shimonoseki. Note the two-tone paint scheme of the bridge girders.

Photographs of Meiji-era railway operations at night are extremely rare for obvious reasons. According to the head lamp positions on the locomotive front, the train in this image (from around 1904) would seem to be an up express train along the Maiko section of the San’yo Tetsudō on a moonlit night.

With a similar nocturnal motif is the commercial postcard seen in this view, showing an approaching San’yo express. Maiko beach was a favorite location for would-be photographers of San’yo trains.

For travelers breaking their journey before proceeding to Kyūshū or Korea, the San’yo Railway built and operated the eponymous San’yo Hotel, shown in this photograph, literally across the street from the station. The hotel was located at a right angle to the station just beyond the fountain appearing at the right in the station view. It was successful enough that the original hotel shown here had been replaced by a larger structure built on the same site by the 1920s.

The introduction of German engineering, locomotives and rolling stock in Shikoku and Kyūshū marks the introduction of the third nation that was to have significant impact upon railway development in Japan, mainly in the area of locomotive design and development. With this addition, all the major non-indigenous ingredients that would combine with those purely Japanese to form the design standards for domestic steam locomotives for the era stretching to the end of steam locomotion in Japan were in place.

Nameraishi Tunnel was one of the remaining substantive obstacles that faced the San’yo in its approach to Shimonoseki. It sat on the San’yo main line just before arrival at its terminal. In this shot, a Baldwin-built (IJGR 5900 Class on nationalization) 4-4-0 locomotive (No. 52 or 92) brings a passenger train out of the tunnel, past a line-side shed showing need of roof repair. Notice the line crossing warning sign for the footpath.

Passengers leaving the San’yo Tetsudō who were continuing on to Kyūshū proceeded to a ferry terminal, where they were taken by one of the ferries shown here across the two-mile Strait of Shimonoseki to the port of Moji. This is a view of the landing at Moji, with the main island of Honshū in the background. The ferry is the San’yo Tetsudō’s San’yo Maru. Luckily for purposes of dating the view, there was a stiff breeze that day and the San’yo Tetsudō mon on the red house flag flying from the mast clearly identifies the ship’s owner. The fact that the ferry flies the San’yo and not the IJGR house flag would seem to indicate that the photograph was taken before Nationalization in 1906.

The San’yo Tetsudō reached what was then the small town of Mitajiri (present day Hōfu) on March 17, 1898 when this station was opened, and there it stopped. Although Mitajiri was less than 55 route-miles from the San’yo’s intended terminus at Shimonoseki, circumstances dictated that it serve as the San’yo terminus for over 2½ years. This view shows early civic efforts to landscape the station forecourt. Judging from where the handcarts are standing, the extension to the right is perhaps the small parcels room. After 1919, this station would serve as the junction for the newly opened Boseki Tetsudō running inland to the town of Hori.

The island of Shikoku was the third of Japan’s four main islands to open a line of railway in 1888. The largest private railway on Shikoku in Meiji times would be the Sanuki Tetsudō, built to 1067mm gauge, which began operations a year after the Iyo Tet. A Sanuki passenger train is seen here entering Marugame station, one of the first stations opened, as a group of schoolboys in military-style school uniforms waits to board at the end of the school day. The Sanuki was absorbed into the San’yo Tetsudō on December 1, 1904.

Takamatsu station, shown here, was opened on February 21, 1897 on what was then the Sanuki Tetsudō. At the time this commemorative postcard marking station renovations was issued, post-nationalization, on July 1, 1910, one of the German Hohenzollern-built 0-4-0T tank locomotives originally purchased for the line is seen in service on this local train, running bunker first. The locomotive wheel mon seen in the center of the special cancellation was introduced by the IJGR late in Meiji and began to supplant the “工” mon in the Taishō reign as the primary corporate logo.

The first railway to be built on Shikoku was the Iyo Tetsudō, remarkably still an independent operating railway today. This first line was a 762mm gauge local affair, using small German 0-4-0T locomotives. The company began service in 1888. This view shows a portion of the right-of-way that skirted a tree-lined country road as a diminutive Iyo train passes by. The railway today is almost entirely an urban passenger carrier.

A typical train on the Uwajima Tetsudō, consisting of a German-built 0-6-0T, three boxcars, and three short passenger cars is seen here somewhere along the line. The Uwajima Tetsudō was, not surprisingly, a local line in the area of Uwajima on the west coast of Shikoku. The first stirrings of the project occurred in late Meiji and a gauge of 762mm was chosen. The first ten mile segment was opened for business on October 18, 1914. Due to the modest size of Shikoku and the tradition of coastal shipping, many railways tended to connect interior towns to the nearest seaports, resulting in relatively shorter route-mileage. Consequently, a good number of lines in Shikoku were built using narrow gauge to save costs.

On the island of Kyūshū, the Kyūshū Tetsudō had been authorized to run a line from Moji, a young town it would help to create at a railhead terminating at a suitable harbor location directly across the Straits of Kanmon from Shimonoseki, southwards to Yatsushiro. Similar to Hokkaidō, large coal deposits were to be found in the close-by Chikuho region which were ripe for development, and these were destined to be developed into the most important coalfields of all Japan. The Kyūshū Tetsudō’s first segment, 22 miles, was opened from Hakata to Kurume (about a third of the way to Kumamoto) on December 11, 1889. The first locomotive on the line, and indeed on the whole island of Kyūshū was a neatly-proportioned Hohenzollern 0-4-0T tank locomotive. Shortly thereafter, the Chikuho Tetsudō, destined to be principally a coal-hauling route, was chartered. Rumschöttel was also instrumental in advising many of the new railways that were soon to flourish in Kyūshū and Shikoku, and the railways of these two islands were to exhibit a distinctively German flavor.

Another local keiben tetsudō (light railway) in an unknown location, perhaps Shikoku where small German tank locomotives were abundant. Such an example slowly edges its train of two unmatched passenger carriages along the streets of a local town.

Komatsushima station in Shikoku on today’s Mugi Line south of Tokushima opened in 1913. It is believed this photo shows a company of soldiers who were being mustered for action assembling in the forecourt of that station in 1914. At the start of WW1, Britain called upon Japan to assist the Allies under the Anglo-Japanese Treaty, and Japanese troops were soon to capture German-occupied territories in the Shantung province of China.

Moji was a town largely created by the Kyūshū Tetsudō as its northern terminus, port, and ferry link to Shimonoseki. For most rail travelers arriving from Honshū, Moji served as the gateway to Kyūshū. Accordingly, when it came time to rebuild the station, it was given a suitably imposing terminal, replete with forecourt fountain, as befits such a symbolically and operationally important location. This second station building was opened in 1914. The town is now a neighborhood of Kitakyūshū and the station building shown here has been preserved.

Part of the charm of Meiji railway operations was the sometimes quaint or unusual practices to be encountered. By the 1840s in Europe and North America, the use of 0-4-0 locomotives for mainline heavy freight haulage was basically a thing of the past, however, in the 1890s, one could find a diminutive German 0-4-0T built by Hohenzollern hauling coal trains along the Kyūshū Tetsudō’s mainline at Moji Harbor. These were the first locomotives bought by the Kyūshū Tetsudō in 1889 and on nationalization became IJGR Class 10. The fact that the world’s smallest type of conventional railway locomotive would be called upon to handle one of the heaviest duties in railroading (mainline coal hauling) evidences the tight finances facing many of even the larger railways of the era. This “make do with what’s available” attitude pervaded Japanese railways in the Meiji era and gave them a truly unique flavor quite their own.

Another notable railway venture was commenced in the outskirts of Tōkyō in 1889: the Kōbu Tetsudō. The Kōbu initially ran from Shinjuku on the Akabane line westward a very modest distance to Hachioji, then an important center of the silk industry, but it was destined to become the first link of a IJGR extension line, called the Chūō (Central) line, that would eventually reach Nagoya and would at last give the military the defensible interior railway line that it had long argued was desirable from the point of view of national defense, providing an alternative route to the coastal portion of the Tokaidō that was so vulnerable to the threat of foreign attack or occupation.

By this time also, it was becoming clear that Japan had a confirmed financial phenomenon on its hands that had been witness in both Great Britain and the US, as its first, rather short-lived phase of what has come to be known as a Railway Mania ensued and investors rushed to speculate on the building of proposed new lines.

Similarly, the government’s bureaucratic structure would undergo a bit of a mania itself. In 1885, the Kōbushō was abolished and the Railway Commission was put under the direct supervision of the Cabinet. By 1890 with the introduction of the new Imperial Diet, the Railway Commission had been replaced by the Railway Agency (sometimes translated Railway Board), and put under control of the Home Office. Naturally its First Chief Commissioner was Inoue Masaru, who by 1887 had become Viscount Inoue, and who, in the same year as he assumed his position as head of the new Railway Agency, would be elected to the House of Peers. Then, in July of 1892, the Railway Agency was put under the control of the newly created Department of Communications. By August of 1897 the Railway Agency had grown to such an extent that it split itself into two Bureaux; one supervisory over both government and private lines (the Tetsudōkyoku) and the other the operative arm of the government railways (the Tetsudō Sagyokyoku). Next, as mentioned, in 1896 on Hokkaidō, railway oversight was transferred from the Department of Communications to the Department of State for Colonial Affairs (Hokkaidō was still treated as a colonial endeavor at that time) only to see that Department abolished in 1897 and railway jurisdiction transferred back to the Department of Communication.

The initial Railway Mania continued only briefly until the bubble burst in 1891. In that year, the failure of one of the most promising and highly-touted proposed private railway schemes, the Koshin Tetsudō (which was projected to run between Matsumoto and Gotemba), retarded the building of private railways, putting an end to Japan’s first Railway Mania. Investors’ confidence was shaken, and stock offerings were not subscribed as quickly as had previously occurred, putting a damper on the brief flourish of railway speculation. Francis Trevithick bemoaned the naïve assumptions of certain would-be railway builders of the time, noting that some “seem to think that they have made ample estimate of the cost of construction when they reckon with an expenditure of thirty to forty thousand Yen per mile, without taking into account the nature of the locality through which their railway is to run; that they sufficiently provide for the cost of carrying on their road if they set apart half of their income for the purpose, no matter how much or how little that income may be; and that industrial and other advantages must at once follow upon the opening of a line.”

An overall view of the Kyūshū Tetsudō’s terminal facilities at Moji on a clear spring day before remodeling of the original station. The company’s yards and coal staithe are clearly visible, while its loco sheds and several locomotives are visible at the end of the line adjacent to the red brick building at the right.

Passengers arriving at Moji in the late Meiji-era were able to view the yards and the company’s coal staithe for loading coal from Kyūshū’s extensive coalfields onto waiting ships for transshipment to Honshū. A neatly designed German 0-4-0T Hohenzollern tank engine appears to be bringing a trainload of empties back. These locomotives, first imported in 1889, were designated “10 Class” after nationalization. Note the character 九 (“Kyū”, the first character of Kyūshū), on each of the wagon sides and the idle mix of coaching stock in the yard below.

Despite the bursting of the bubble, the year 1891 nevertheless saw the passing of two significant milestones. The Kyūshū Tetsudō mainline from Moji to Kumamoto was completed on July 1^st and the Nippon Tetsudō reached Aomori on September 1^st. (The Railway Bureau formally turned over operations of the Nippon Tetsudō to the company’s management on April 1, 1892.) Inasmuch as the San’yo had opened its mainline as far as Onomichi on November 3^rd 1891, it was now possible to travel from the interior of Hokkaidō by rail to Temiya/Otaru, ferry to Aomori, travel the length of Honshū south to Onomichi, take a steamer to Moji and thence travel by rail to Kumamoto. The major segment of the trans-Japan system still glaringly incomplete was the San’yo Railway’s Onomichi to Shimonoseki segment. Much of the San’yo’s difficulty would lay in the lack of a comprehensive set of eminent domain laws, which emboldened landowners to hold out for excessive sums. Progress had been delayed partly as a result of the high number of rivers that had to be bridged as the San’yo followed its route along the coast, but the intransigence of landowners formed a notable impediment. Writing at the time, Japan authority Basil Chamberlain commented, “The construction of the Inland Sea Railway [San’yō Tetsudō] is at a standstill for this reason, as no capitalists can afford to buy land at the preposterous sums demanded by the owners.” The travel writer W. E. Curtis agreed generally, “[In Japan]... there is no law authorizing condemnation proceedings to secure a right of way, which is often troublesome.” This was something of a misunderstanding. Land condemnation in the Western sense had been recognized as early as 1872 by Finance Ministry Ordinance No. 159. In 1875, Grand Council of State Ordinance No. 132 “Regulations on Land Purchase for Private Use” (Kōyō Tochi Kaiage Kisoku) were issued, which specifically provided a private company the right to condemn privately owned land for the construction of railways. However, in 1889, the 1875 regulations were replaced with the Land Condemnation Act (Tochi Shūyō Hō), which added the requirement of satisfactory consultation with landowners as an additional step in the process. This gave enterprising landowners a procedural windfall. As the realization of the new law’s import set in, “consultation” frequently came to be used as a delaying tactic by which lucky landowners often extracted a higher price, and it is during the time in which the 1889 Regulations were effective that the San’yo met with its right-ofway acquisition difficulties. The consultation requirements were only in effect for a year or two before the abuses to the system had become evident enough that the law was amended, in 1890, to accelerate the consultative process, undoubtedly much to the relief of the railway industry in general. By 1900, the whole statutory scheme for condemnation was settled with the adoption of a new set of statutes that would remain the basic condemnation law up to the end of the Second World War.

Coal was one of the major commodities that were transshipped through Wakamatsu Station, the Chikuho Tetsudō’s port in competition with Moji. The harbor itself was developed beginning in 1889 with coal traffic expressly in mind. Its passenger station is at the end of the curve at the far left. In 1897 the Chikuho was absorbed into the growing Kyūshū Tetsudō system. When this photo was taken around 1903, a single American-built locomotive, probably one of the moguls favored by the Kyūshū, is seen steaming out of the passenger terminal. Hopper cars full of coal are otherwise the predominant vehicles seen in the rail yard, while the masts of coastal lighters are predominate in the harbor.

A mundane scene of the Mitsui Company’s warehouses in Moji harbor, with the corporate mon worked into the pediment brickwork: a good view showing Kyūshū Tetsudō boxcars and hopper cars circa 1890. American-inspired self-emptying hopper cars to facilitate transshipment of coal were used from earliest days by the Kyūshū Tetsudō. Note the two boxcars with brakeman’s duckets.

Leaving Moji, the Kyūshū Tetsudō’s mainline ran along Akasaka Beach, much in the manner of the San’yo’s mainline in the vicinity of Maiko. A Kyūshū passenger train cuts through the summer haze in this shot. Note the white gradient marker in the foreground in the British style.

Kokura, part of present day Kitakyūshū, was the largest city in the north of Kyūshū, situated between Moji to the east and Wakamatsu to the west. Despite its importance, the town was given a relatively modest station building, as this view shows, although the length of the pedestrian footbridge is evidence of several departure and arrival platforms.

Saitozaki is located on a long peninsula creating the Hakata Wan (Wan is the word for Bay) and sheltering Hakata and Fukuoka harbor in the coal-rich northern region of Kyūshū. The town was the terminal of the Hakatawan Tetsudō when it opened in 1904. In the first of these two scenes from that town, a mixed Hakatawan train consisting of coal hopper cars with three four-wheel passenger cars at the end departs from the station, while the station staff return to other duties, in a scene redolent of local or branch line operations in Meiji times. In the second view, a train of coal hopper cars, apparently empties judging from the brakeman riding inside the last one, is being pulled away from the coal staithes at Saitozaki after being discharged there. Coal was the major commodity carried by railways in this region of Kyūshū.

A fine view of a Kyūshū express train piloted by a 4-4-0 locomotive on the Tatara River bridge in the Chikuzen area on the approach to Hakata and Fukuoka, with a traditional Japanese boat moored in the foreground. The Schenectady-built class would become IJGR 5700 class on nationalization.

Yawata Station and the Yawata Steel Mill that was to be the cradle of the Japanese steel industry are shown in this view taken shortly after the plant started operations; the Kyūshū Tetsudō’s mainline separating the two. The start of steel production at the mill would be the first step in enabling Japan to become self-sufficient in the production of steel for its domestic locomotive building (and other) needs. Yawata is a part of the present day city of Kitakyushu, and is situated almost directly south of Wakamatsu.

Fukuoka’s Chiyō-no-matsubara, (“Thousand Year Old Pine Grove”), was on the route of the Kyūshū Tetsudō, and this view shows one of its trains passing through the celebrated location, probably piloted by a Schenectady mogul. The locomotive appears to have its headlamps positioned at smokebox top and right bufferbeam positions: the reverse of what was used by the IJGR and San’yo (smokebox top and bufferbeam left) to indicate an express train.

As all this new building had been getting underway, it became clear to the government that the theretofore piecemeal way in which it had been treating railway charter approval was inefficient and that regulation would be necessary for policy, public safety, and national security purposes. As mentioned, a start in setting forth a comprehensive body of law governing railways had been made in 1872 and again in 1879 and 1883 saw the extension of the general and punitive rules that had applied to Government lines to all private railways. December 1885 saw the adoption of laws governing railway finance and created a distinct difference in the manner of railway finance in Japan vis-à-vis Western nations: in Japan debenture bonds were less likely to be used as a first line source of funding. 1887 saw the adoption of an Imperial Ordinance styled the “Private Railway Regulations,” but the 1887 Regulations eventually would prove to be unduly cumbersome. In 1892 the government again restructured, creating the Department of Communications and putting the Railway Agency under its aegis, severing it from Home Office jurisdiction, but not before reverting its name to the old formula of Railway Bureau mentioned earlier. By this time, the earlier regulatory scheme was seen to be undesirable. Accordingly the government promulgated its first comprehensive legislation on the subject, the Law of Construction of Railways that later came to be known in short-hand manner as the “1892 Railway Law” and formed by Imperial Ordinance what became know in English as the “Railway Council” as an advisory regulatory body charged with supervising the nation’s railways. The Council was to consist of 21 members, a President, ten members from the Diet, three members (one each) from the Department of Home Affairs, the Treasury, and the Department of Agriculture and Commerce, four from the Department of Communications, and four from the Military. This law and the Council would constitute the legal and regulatory framework for railway building for the balance of the Meiji era, with the addition to another act added later in 1910. (Hokkaidō was addressed specially in a law governing railway building on that island in 1896 and there was a further law of 1900 superseding the existing private railway regulation.) As one can see, concerns over maintaining national integrity in the face of foreign colonial adventures was reflected in the large influence the military was given on the Council: its members equaled in number those that the Railway Bureau itself could name, and it formalized what had come to be military involvement in railway matters, out of national security concerns, dating back from the aftermath of the Satsuma Rebellion. Along those lines, the 1892 law codified the requirement of private railways to offer their lines for the use of the Army or Navy either in time of peace or war.

The Fukuhaku Densha Kidō took its name from the initial kanji of Fukuoka and Hakata, between which it ran. The all-electric railway was built to 1435mm gauge and opened in 1910. This view shows one of the railway’s carbarns being visited by a group of local schoolboys. Within a year, the line had changed it’s name, so the photo caption and track so newly laid (apparently on little or no sub-base) that it had yet to be ballasted seem to date the scene to the first year of operation. Note the roughly hewn irregular crossties.

These two views shown the station in Sasebo, town-side and track-side, dating from late Meiji. As one of Japan’s principal naval bases was located there, the Kyūshū Tetsudō naturally ran a short branch line to the city and port from its Nagasaki main line. The station was opened in 1898.

In early Meiji times, Fukuoka was an old castle town across the Nakagawa river from the commoner’s town of Hakata. By the time this photograph was taken, Fukuoka had started to envelope Hakata, which is now a ward in Fukuoka. As these twin cities formed one of the larger population centers of Kyūshū and as this point was also near the junction (actually at nearby Tosu) between the Kyūshū Tetsudō’s mainline south to Kumamoto and its branch west to Karatsu, plans for a station on a grander scale were put in hand by late Meiji as seen here. It seems to have lent its style to the second Moji terminal that would be completed in the following Taishō reign.

This and the following three views trace the development of Nagasaki station, trackside and street side. The Kyūshū Tetsudō reached Nagasaki in 1897. The station it built, shown here, was a thoroughly utilitarian structure, similar to IJGR standard designs. The railway was extended an additional mile in 1905 to a more desirable location for a terminal, on land reclaimed from the harbor in the very heart of the city. When the new terminal was opened, this station was renamed Urakami.

The first Nagasaki station, at far left, from the yards as a mixed train departs. Note the ornate reverse-curve bracketing on the side braces of the wooden hopper cars to the right. As Nagasaki was a strategic refueling station for both international and domestic shipping, it was inevitable that a brisk trade in coal would develop to supply the port’s busy stream of steamships. The fact that the station is not called Urakami in this view dates the scene to before 1905.

The second Nagasaki station, a structure in Japanese vernacular cottage orné style, shown after its opening in 1905. Within the space of a few short years, passenger traffic had increased to a point that the Kyūshū Tetsudō judged that a much more imposing edifice was justified for its new station when the line was extended, including a second story with an enlarged suite of offices. Bicycles and electric lighting have come into vogue by the time of this photo.

This trackside view of the second Nagasaki station obviously suggests conscious planning for increased train lengths. Initially, many early Japanese stations were built with relatively simple track plans that didn’t necessitate large signal boxes from which to operate the station turnouts. The small kiosk at the end of the platform canopy appears to serve that purpose in this view.

A prime example of an ALCO (Pittsburgh) Prairie tank locomotive built for the Kyūshū Tetsudō, destined to become Class 3400 upon nationalization. These were among the heaviest American 2-6-2 tank locomotives imported to Japan and were placed in service between 1896 and 1899. American locomotive builders often provided photographs with specifications such as this to potential customers as a sales device.

A Kyūshū Tetsudō Express train on the approach to Nagasaki, running along the Honmyo River near Isahaya, a town at the very south-eastern tip of the Ōmura Bay. The train is piloted by a Schenectady Mogul mixed traffic locomotive introduced in 1899 and favored by this line due to its heavy coal traffic. On nationalization, these locomotives would be designated the 8550 class.

The Railway Law of 1892 also set forth a rational plan for future railway development in the realm. The touchstone of the law was the premise that every prefecture of the realm was to be served by rail transport. A two-phased construction programme was envisioned: the so-called “First Period Construction Programme” of high priority lines to be completed within 12 years and a “Second Period Construction Programme” of low priority lines. Some 40 proposed routes totaling about 1,900 miles were selected for inclusion in the First Period group, based upon the familiar factors of the proposed line’s role in encouraging economic development of particular areas or industries, strategic military importance, and the like. The new law allowed a private railway to opt to build any of the lines identified in the government programme if construction had not been started and the Diet consented. A pattern soon was to develop that the government would leave the proposed lines which showed greater potential for profitable returns to private companies to build and operate, while it would build some of the lines which showed less potential for profit, but which were deemed necessary for national policy purposes: the purely military lines, or lines which would integrate remote, sparsely inhabited regions into the nation. The Second Period group totaled around 2,525 miles. The stage had been set for extensive railway expansion.

One of Mitsui’s American industrial saddle tank locomotives built by H. K. Porter goes about its chores at Manda, where the locomotive sheds were located, in this pre-1910 view of the conglomerate’s Miike Mine that appears on this early (used) postcard. High-sided iron plate gondolas such as the one shown were atypical for the period.

Ōmuta lies on the Kyūshū Tetsudō mainline, roughly two-thirds of the way from Fukuoka to Kumamoto. The brass-radiatored landaulette parked at the front door awaiting the arrival of the next train would have been quite a rare thing to see at a small-town Meiji-era station such as Ōmuta. But Ōmuta was located near the abundant Miike coalmines, which added to civic wealth. The auto is an obvious manifestation of that prosperity; perhaps a taxi, but more likely the limousine of a particularly prominent local citizen. The town was also near one of the largest prisons in Meiji Japan, the Sūchi-kan, where a sentence of hard labor usually meant work in the mines.

* * * * * * * * *

The Tokaidō line had been completed only a bit over two years when disaster struck and service was cut. At 6:40 in the morning of October 28, 1891, minutes after a Tokaidō line train had crossed the Nagara-gawa bridge near Nagoya, a violent earthquake struck and the bridge was toppled into the river below. This event marked the beginning of the Great Nōbi Earthquake of 1891, the epicenter of which was centered in the Nōbi plain, where Nagoya is located. The first indication to those areas unaffected was the interruption of telegraph communications with the area. A Tōkyō correspondent for The Times of London caught the first available Nagoya-bound train and left us his observations of the devastation wrought along the Tokaidō line:

“From the outskirts of a district covering the Nagoya-Gefu [sic, Gifu] plain, which, roughly speaking, lies half-way between Tōkyō and Ōsaka, news came fast, but as it came it grew more terrible. From the district itself, although it was covered with towns and cities, and through it the trunk line of Japan passes, for some time nothing could be learnt. All was silent. Trains did not appear, and as telegraphic communication had ceased, their whereabouts was unknown. Next we learned that several bridges had been destroyed; then that cities had been shaken down, that many were burning, and that thousands of people had been killed.

Leaving Tōkyō by a night train, early next morning we were at Hamamatsu, 137 miles from Tōkyō, on the outside edge of the destructive area. Here, although the motion had been sufficiently severe to displace the posts supporting the heavy roof of a temple, and to ruffl e a few tiles along the eaves of houses, nothing serious had occurred. At one point there was a sinkage in the line, and we [the train] had to proceed with caution; but farther along the line signs of violent movement became more numerous. The general appearance was as if some giant hand had taken rails and sleepers and rubbed them back and forth in their bed of ballast, piling the sand and gravel into bolster-like ridges. At places where the sleepers held too tightly to their bed, the rails themselves yielded and had been bent into snake-like curves.

The ground is cracked and thrown into huge waves, whilst near the bridges the embankment has been shot from beneath the sleepers so that the rails remain suspended in the air. The huge masonry piers have almost invariably been cut through near the base, and have then been danced and twisted from their true position. Cast-iron columns and huge cylinders have been snapped into several pieces, much as one might snap a carrot. For twenty-eight miles no stations remain; only platforms and floors, hummocked and thrown into waves, mark their places. For five years the railway works withstood traffic, typhoons, and floods. When they succumbed it was not only to the unexpected, but to the application of forces practically irresistible.”

Shortly after Ishaya on the Kyūshū Tetsudō’s route to Nagasaki came the town of Ōkusa on the southern shore of the Ōmura Bay, which partially delineates the Nishisonogi Peninsula. This view shows a northbound passenger train along what was a particularly scenic segment on the Nagasaki line.

Still in the Ōkusa vicinity, an express passenger train through the approaches of town. Humble box cars such as the one seen directly behind the tender were often found in Kyūshū passenger train consists of the day, used for baggage or express parcel service.

A good view of the Miike industrial railway’s own hopper cars, with buffers well to the center line to enable them to negotiate the tight radii of the curves present in the Kachidachi pit’s railway system, seemingly rendering them incompatible with conventionally buffered mainline stock. This fact may indicate that these hoppers generally were not expected to leave the limits of the mine’s industrial railway network. The very steep curved incline at the far right of the image seems to suggest the existence of a return ramp from a gravity loading-trestle where the mine hoppers could have been discharged into empty mainline cars waiting underneath, and then rolled back down via that ramp by gravity into the yards of the mine system.

The other end of the Miike coal trade’s traffic pattern in Kyūshū is shown in this view of very modern (by Meiji standards) bulk transfer loaders that were adopted for coaling ships or lading colliers. Even until the end of the Meiji era, one of the most common ways of coaling a ship in Japanese ports was by masses of coaling crews in a flotilla of small craft laden with baskets of coal who would come alongside ship with scaling ladders and perform the entire coaling operation by dint of sheer human muscle.

Kyūshū Tetsudō travelers arriving at Kumamoto could have transferred to the tiny trains of the Kumamoto Keiben Tetsudō, which opened on December 20, 1907 and was a harbinger of the way future light railways that resulted from the 1910 Light Railways Law would appear. These three scenes show the station at Kami-Kumamoto (about 2 miles north of Kumamoto), a train near the Fujisaki Shrine entrance, and a train crossing a bridge alongside the unfinished iron bridge of a newly built road near the celebrated Honmyō-ji temple. Note the fascinated toddler intently watching the passing train in the Fujisaki scene at far right. The low-boilered locomotive in the top photo appears to be a domestic product of the Amemiya Works, founded in 1907.

No fewer than 63 bridges of the Tokaidō line alone were destroyed or wrecked and railway embankments sank at 45 places, sometimes subsiding over 13 feet. The stretch of line between Hamamatsu and Maibara was the worst affected. Numerous stations along this stretch were completely destroyed and traffic along this stretch was totally suspended. Rebuilding began immediately. Rough temporary buildings were slapped together quickly to serve in the place of demolished stations. Ruined masonry from bridge abutments was cleared, and such spans as could be repaired were re-used. It was found that repairing many of the bridges took about as much effort as building an entirely new structure. By March 12 of the following year, the line between Gifu and the Kiso River was re-opened, and on the 30^th of that month the Nagara river bridge was ready. Through traffic between Tōkyō and Kōbe wasn’t resumed until April 16, 1892, an interruption of service lasting 5½ months. The 1891 earthquake was the first major earthquake to affect the railway system since its inception and it gave immediate impetus to fledgling Japanese scientific efforts in the area of seismological studies.

An express pulls into Beppu station with a Schenectady-built 8550 Class Mogul at its head. Beppu was long famed for its hot springs well before Meiji times, and indeed remains so today. The IJGR reached the city, which is located along the northeast coast of the island, in July of 1911. The Japanese caption extols the fact that the hot water in the station lavatories is furnished from one of the nearby hot springs, quite a luxury at a time when few stations were piped with hot water.

Shown here is the railway system for Japan as it existed or was projected to be built circa 1892, shortly after the adoption of the principle that every prefecture in Japan was to be served by railway communication. Hakodate in Hokkaidō has yet to be linked to the railway network of that island, and several lines projected in Kyūshū and Shikoku have apparently yet to be the subject of even a preliminary survey, as they are shown as arrow-straight routes, something next to impossible in a country as mountainous as Japan. Those of the lines that actually were built would resemble nothing like the direct routes indicated here.

While repairs from the 1891 earthquake were in progress, efforts also turned in earnest to the Usui pass, which was being reexamined, in order to join the Naoetsu–Ueda line at Yokokawa with the Karuizawa line leading down to Tōkyō, so as to bisect Honshū. Francis Trevithick had been put in charge of the project and had received instructions in 1889 to report on the best methods to connect the two lines. He moved to the construction site to oversee progress, but reportedly didn’t enjoy the assignment in part due to the fact that little food other than rice and vegetables was available locally. IJGR engineer Homma Eiichirō (1853– 1927), assisted by engineers Yoshikawa Sanjirō (1860–1916) and Watanabe Shinshirō, commenced work in October 1890, and put another survey in hand. Yoshikawa was one of two engineers who had recently been sent abroad to Europe to study, and had been given the opportunity to observe the Harz Mountain Railway in Germany, which was constructed as a cog railway, using the Abt rack system, by which a gear-toothed “rack” or central third rail is laid in the middle of the track on which a specially constructed locomotive which had a gear between it’s frames could be engaged in the rack and used to propel the locomotive and train up an incline. Yoshikawa was duly impressed by the Abt cog railway system and advocated its adoption on the Usui line. This recommendation carried the day, and the Abt system was adopted for the line. A final survey was made in 1891, four locomotives equipped with the special Abt gear mechanism were ordered from the Esslingen locomotive works in Germany, and construction was begun. The line, as finally adopted was only 7 miles long, but that 7 miles with gradients as steep as 1 in 15 (6.67%) contained 26 tunnels and 18 viaducts: mountain railway construction on a scale that only the Swiss were facing. The survey squeezed out just enough room about mid-way up the ascent to install passing sidings long enough for up and down trains to pass each other at the station of Kumanotaira. Construction began in March 1891.

As the locomotives arrived from Germany in 1893, they were quickly put to work and almost as quickly, it was determined that they were capable of hauling only about 66% of the loads that had been expected of them up the line. Some improvement was made when the builder advised that full steam was not to be used to power the cylinder driving the gear mechanism, but only to use as much as was necessary to augment the work of the cylinders driving the wheels. Further refinement of firing techniques, such as keeping a forceful induced draught by means of opening the blower (a valve which released a jet of steam up the locomotive’s chimney, creating a more forceful Venturi-like vacuum effect in the firebox, resulting in a much more robust firebox fire as air was drawn through the coal fire) helped to keep up a fuller head of steam. Because it was difficult to coordinate working of two of the Abt locomotives on a single train (the gearing would cause modulations and result in uneven pulling), only one Abt locomotive was used, while a conventional locomotive was coupled to each train as an auxiliary power unit. The original locomotives were not the masters of their tasks, and the order to Esslingen was not to be repeated. Larger, heavier Abt-equipped locomotives were ordered from Beyer-Peacock in England. The entire line was opened to traffic on April 1, 1893 and was one of the marvels of early Japanese railway engineering, having been constructed in a span of 25 months. With the Usui conquered, Japan could congratulate itself on having mastered the art of railway building in the harshest mountainous terrain. The Naoetsu–Ueda line was linked with the Takasaki–Yokokawa line, thence with Tōkyō, and the whole trunk line could at last live up to its official designation as the Shin’etsu Line. In due time, the Usui segment would come to be second only to the Hokuriku line among single-tracked lines in terms of traffic density.

An American traveler by the name of Charles Taylor recorded what a trip via the Nippon Tetsudō to Maebashi, and thence onward over the Shin’etsu line was like when the line was still new:

“Arriving at the [Nikko] station, we find a number of natives, with here and there a foreigner, awaiting the opening of the gates that admit one to the train. This crowd of travelers is very interesting to me, while I seem to be just as curious an object to them. The gates open and the cars are filled with the motely throng. The bell rings, the whistle blows, and at 7:45 we are off for the heart of Japan. As we steam southward to Ut-so-no-miya [Utsunomiya] we again pass the beautiful avenue of cryptomerias [leading to the famed tombs of the Tokugawa shōguns in Nikko]. Many odd sights meet our eyes as we ride through the country... I observe gates at many points where the railway intersects the road.¹⁰ These gates are almost invariably managed by young Japanese girls. On the road to Omiya we cross the Tone-gawa, by a strong, well-constructed bridge. Having forty minutes at Omiya, while waiting to make a connection, I stroll through the place... On leaving the station we can plainly see Fuji-yama... Our train goes speeding (!) on at the rate of fifteen miles an hour. The cars in Japan do no appear with such encouraging legends as those in America, such as “The Flyer,” “Lightning Express,” “Wild Cat,” and similar high-sounding titles. We are in a second class car. This is not only a cheaper mode of travel, but when there are no ladies in the party the comfort is almost equal to that of first-class compartments. In our section are several Japanese, among them a young girl of about twenty years, evidently alone. Next to her sits an old man, dressed in a kimono, a felt hat, and wooden shoes. The day being hot, the man cools himself by lifting his kimono up to his waist and fanning his bare legs with it, regardless of a lady’s presence or ourselves.... We have a fine view from the car window of An-naka station. Here we behold mountains on all sides... At Yokogawa [Yokokawa] we stop for about twenty minutes, when I leave the car to stretch my cramped limbs and bathe my face and hands at a neighboring fountain.... Our train consists of eight passenger coaches and two very powerful locomotives, one forward, and one at the rear of the train, for we are to be pushed up an incline of one foot to fifteen, over the Usui Pass, from Yokogawa to Karuisawa station. In this short ride we pass through twenty-six tunnels, whose total length is two and three quarters miles, the longest one extending one thousand seven hundred and seventy-two feet. For safety¹¹ the engines run upon a sort of cogged chain placed between the rails; for if a brake should slip, or an accident happen, we would all be hurled to the bottom of the incline. Some of the tunnels are quite short. They are all built of brick or stone. We pass through one after another until we reach Karuisawa at last, at an elevation of four thousand feet. Here we spend the night.

[Resuming the journey on the following day] This part of the journey is very interesting. A descent of nearly four thousand feet causes the little train to move more rapidly than usual, and the road is considered the most picturesque in Japan. There are deep gullies in the mountainsides, down which flow streams of water to the rivers below. On either side of the railroad the golden harvest of the rice field is ready for the reaper.... after crossing the Chikuma-gawa and the Saigawa we arrive safely at Nagano...”

The Great Nōbi Earthquake of 1891, the largest earthquake centered on land in modern Japanese history, was the first truly severe earthquake with which Japanese railways had to contend. The Nagara River Bridge (shown in the top two views), designed in 1888 by the yatoi C. A. W. Pownall, was at the time the longest in Japan. Unfortunately, it was also closest to the epicenter and was the hardest hit, with three of its five spans collapsing. The first photograph is said to have been taken by John Milne, Professor Emeritus at the Kōbudaigakkō (now Tokyo University) and inventor of the seismograph, during his investigations following the disaster. The other two are probably also his handiwork or that of his associate, William Burton. Minor damage to the Tokaidō mainline is shown in the photograph to the left.

With the conquest of the Usui being his crowning accomplishment, in March of 1893 Inoue Masaru felt it was time to strike out to other endeavors and resigned as the Director of the Railway Bureau. Perhaps he had also gotten his fill of bearing the brunt of adverse public opinion, stirred up by would-be private railway promoters who wanted to neutralize his zealous advocacy of nationalization. Rumors were circulated that his stance on nationalization was a mask to cover his own enrichment and amassing of power. In any event, his successor was Matsumoto Sohichirō (1848–1903), who had been educated in the United States, and was more favorably disposed to the use of American-built locomotives on the Imperial Government lines. For his part, Inoue never left railroading as a profession, and continued to carry colored pebbles in his pocket whenever he rode a rail line to toss out the train window when traveling over rough sections of track that were out of alignment, to which fact he would alert the stationmaster at the next stop. More than one railway employee who was lax or fellow passenger who was careless were known to have been upbraided by Old Thunder after he had retired.

Just as the Usui was being conquered, a barrier of a different nature was being overcome. At the opposite end of the Imperial Railways system, at Kōbe, the first locomotive to be built in Japan rolled out of the erecting shop and was put to its initial tests. The British superintendent of the Kōbe shops at that time was Richard Trevithick, grandson of the British pioneer of the same name. While the grandfather could claim to be the man who built the first railway locomotive in the United Kingdom, his grandson could make a claim to have designed and built the first locomotive in Japan. Only unfinished pieces for one of the cylinders and four axles were sent from the UK as rough castings (all turning and finishing was done in Japan) and the steel for the frame plates was shipped semi-cut and planed to tracings sent from Japan. Other than these pieces, the locomotive was entirely built from iron and steel stocks on hand at the Kōbe shops. As one of the latest innovations in railway locomotive design at the time was compounding, using the power that still was present in exhaust steam by piping that exhaust to a second cylinder to do useful work, it was decided to build the locomotive on one of the various compound configurations that was then in great favor in engineering circles.¹² The locomotive was built according to a design scheme that had been devised by Thomas Worsdell of the North Eastern Railway in Great Britain. Since compound locomotives used the residual power of steam more efficiently than simple locomotives that exhausted steam after one passage through the cylinders, they were theoretically cheaper to operate, as they burned less coal for the same amount of work. For Japan, a country whose coal reserves were not overly abundant, this new technology was of interest.

One of the specially-ordered Abt System Beyer-Peacock C2 or 3920 Class four-cylinder tank locomotives is seen here pulling a train on the Usui or Shin’etsu line. The steep grades limited singly headed train lengths to consists such as these: only 7 or 8 four-wheel carriages. This photograph affords a good view of the toothed center rack rail of the Abt System, into which two geared wheels, each driven by a separate cylinder and located beneath the locomotive, engaged.

With 18 bridges and 26 tunnels squeezed in to seven miles of line, the Usui railway was one of the most prodigious engineering feats of Meiji railway building. The flavor of this line is shown by this photograph showing two of those tunnels and the rack railway to good effect, prior to the electrification that occurred in the final years of the Meiji reign. Naturally, the novelty of a visit by a photographer has not escaped the keen observational powers of the local children, who supervise the undertaking to insure that all goes well, and provide a good benchmark against which to judge the distance between some of the line’s tunnels.

Kumanotaira station was a passing station that was squeezed into the Usui line to allow trains to pass roughly mid-point along its length. In this pre 1911 electrification photograph, a train full of passengers waits as a 12 or 13 car freight train powered by two tank (one conventional and one Abt) engines emerges from one the line’s several tunnels on a warm summer day. That two locomotives were required to bring such a relatively short freight train up the line’s ascent speaks volumes about the heavy grades involved. As a safety precaution, the second locomotive was always positioned in the middle or rear of the train, which was re-marshaled at the end of the run when conventional steam locomotives took over.

The summit at Usui was marked by an imposing viaduct, shown here as the tail end of a passenger train enters the summit tunnel, with the second locomotive plainly visible in the penultimate position. Note the entrance to yet another tunnel on the downgrade, the mouth of which is visible in the mid-distance. Although the Usui line has long since been abandoned in favor of an improved route, the viaduct still exists today as part of a historically designated National Park, and is preserved as a Culturally Important Property.

Single-lined Japanese railways were worked using the British ticket and staff system in the days before block signaling and in lieu of the American telegraphic train dispatcher system. Only when a train’s driver was carrying the staff or token for a particular section of line was his train permitted to pass along it; the staff representing the right to run along the section for which it was marked. On arrival at the station marking the end of the section, the staff would be handed over to the stationmaster, who would in turn hand over the staff for the next section of line ahead if it was present at the station. Here, the white-capped stationmaster of one of the stations along the IJGR Usui line is seen handing the staff for that section to the footplate crew just prior to departure. From the cab details, it is possible to identify this locomotive as one of the German-built Esslingen C1 or 3900 Class 0-6-0T Abt system tank locomotives of 1892 that were specially ordered for this line. The view was taken during the visit of the World Transportation Commission to that line to inspect its operations sometime during its junket in 1894–1896.

One of the Abt cogged locomotives at the head of a train of six box-cars and an open wagon, followed by an conventional auxiliary locomotive and final brake-van or caboose is seen over a local torii gate leaving Karuizawa on the Shin’etsu mainline, with the station and town in the background, in pre-electrification days. While this stretch of line was relatively level, the short length of the train gives a good indication of the grades it is about to encounter.

Shown here, in this view stamped as of the first day of the Taishō era, is IJGR Abt System electric locomotive 10004, German-built by AEG, that was placed in service on the Usui line in the final days of the Meiji reign. While the locomotive is stopped with trolley poles down at Karuizawa, a crew of curious railway workers examines the running gear of this then-novel example of motive power. Note the locomotive’s air horn, pointing downwards and mounted on the cab corner nearest to the photographer.

Karuizawa station itself is shown in these two photographs. This is the second station building that replaced the original. That the station staff is posed in such manner leads one to believe the photograph was at least a semi-official one. In the image on the right, two redcaps are visible wearing protective heavy leather aprons emblazoned with a large IJGR “工” mon along with two young boys in happi coats and white caps who are perhaps station helpers or telegraph messengers. The lengths of rail laying along the right-of-way with the kind of bull-head profile used for third-rail electrification seem to date the view to that period before 1911 when the line was being prepared for electrification.

The new locomotive would also be the first compound design to operate in Japan. It rolled out of Kōbe works on May 26, 1893 and was so satisfactory in its subsequent tests that a program of building an additional eight locomotives, although for simplicity’s sake, of a non-compound variety was approved. For the record, the locomotive, No. 221, was built along the lines of a classic “A8” class 2-4-2T tank locomotive, right down to the Joy’s radial valve gear, duplicating a typical A8 locomotive as closely as possible, so that a meaningful fuel efficiency comparison could be made between 221 and a standard A8. For poor Trevithick, some newspapers from the Japanese press, in a fit of national pride, reported the loco as having been built and designed by one of the native engineer-employees of Kōbe shops, and this must have greatly wounded his pride, as his brother Francis went on record in a paper delivered to the Asia Society of London only a year later, lamenting that credit wasn’t given where due and was instead was “being already given to a Japanese who has very little mechanical knowledge.” But as a consolation, Trevithick was able to report with some pride in the same report that by this time, the Shimbashi and Kōbe car shops could produce 120 carriages and 480 wagons a year, and with modest expenditure, could have been easily brought up to a capacity for manufacturing 10 locomotives a year, which would have been a creditable enough capacity in the area of rolling stock construction at that time. In the end, the government did not actively enter into the locomotive building business as an endeavor, but left this to private enterprise. Japan’s first domestically-built locomotive would later be transferred to the Sakhalin Islands, where one source reports it being scrapped in 1929, while others maintain it vanished with Russian control following the close of the Second World War.

A fine summer day’s view of a train hauled by two of the 10000 class electric locomotives crossing the Usui viaduct in the earliest days of electrical operation.

1893 also saw the IJGR commence construction of the Ōū line from Fukushima on the Nippon Tetsudō mainline, via the Sea of Japan coastline to rejoin it at Aomori, and the first section of the Hokuriku line from Tsuruga to Fukui on the way to Toyama, where the Noto peninsula joined the mainland. The long shelved plans for a defensible interior trunk line, the Chōū (“Central”) line, were also revisited in the 1892 law, which authorized its building in a somewhat altered route from that originally proposed in 1885. Perhaps buoyed by the conquest of the Usui Pass, the planners at the Railway Department had reconsidered the concept behind the Nakasendō route. The Chūō line (as the new line came to be known) differed from the 1885 route in that it would start from the new-comer Kōbu Tetsudō’s railhead at Hachioji, running westerly to Kofu, thence to Shiojiri where it followed first the Narai river that emptied into the Sea of Japan and then the Kiso river than emptied into the Pacific Ocean, crossing the Torii Pass. (The Kiso segment was a portion of the route originally envisioned in 1885.) Finally it again diverged from the original Kiso route to proceed to Nagoya. This line was desirable not only from the standpoint of having an easily defensible interior trunk line, but also because it ran through some of the prime silk producing territory of Japan. (Silk and tea were still Japan’s first and second top exports.) Work was to begin in 1892 (although the Kōbu segment incorporated into its route was already in existence), and run through some very mountainous topography. Mountain railway working was fast becoming one of the necessities of business. The Sasago Tunnel lay along the line, and at 4,657 meters upon inauguration, it was by far the longest tunnel in Japan, and remained so until the 1930s. By one source’s count, by 1903 there were over 40 stretches of line in Japan with gradients ranging from 1 in 50 to 1 in 30, extremely heavy grades by railway standards, and over 50 segments with grades in excess of 1 in 100, some for a distance of up to 40 miles.

* * * * * * * * *

In 1894, international events started to impact on railway building. Since as early as 1874, the new government had been running into difficulties with China, when native tribes in Taiwan had killed Japanese fishermen who had put in there during a storm, which, when the Chinese Government demurred, resulted in a punitive expedition Japan led to Taiwan. Trouble next developed in Korea, a country that had long been a Chinese tributary state—what today we would perhaps call a satellite state—where the ruling Yi dynasty, in power since 1392, was in the death throes of corruption and decay. Russia was making aggressive moves in the area of Manchuria, and had just announced the construction of the Trans-Siberian Railway, leaving Japan troubled over the prospect of the build-up of Russian power in Manchuria and Vladivostok, and the possibility of Korea falling under Russian dominance. The possibility of a free-for-all power grab on the Korean peninsula, bringing Western colonial domination and the probability of colonial military bases to its doorstep was more than Japan could stomach, and Japan had taken the lead on diplomatic maneuverings that had resulted in China implicitly recognizing the sovereign status of Korea. As the intrigue among rival factions of the Yi dynasty court in Seoul increased, various factions played China and Japan off against each other with promises of proposed alliances. Japan used aggressive diplomatic maneuverings to put China in an antagonistic position with it over the political instability in Seoul and the safety of foreign (specifically Japanese) residents there. Eventually unrest broke out, resulting in the Korean monarch requesting China to send troops to Seoul. This was a violation of an earlier agreement between China and Japan not to send troops to Korea unilaterally, giving rise to a justification for Japan to send its own troops as well.

Locomotive 10000 and one of its sisters (located mid-train) haul a passenger train up the Usui grade after electrification. Usui Line coaching stock typically consisted of the older four-wheel non-corridor compartment stock, as such stock was lighter, having less dead-weight than the longer passenger cars on trucks with vestibules and lavatories. The new locomotives were designed for both catenary wire and third rail operation. The third rail is visible to the right of the track in this view.

As one former yatoi from the Kōbushō noted, “... as far back as 1881,... memorials [had been] addressed to the Dragon Throne [of China] by the famous trio Liu Ming Chu’an, Li Hung Chang, and Tso Tsung Tang. It does little to quote these in full, but the gist of their argument was that as the ‘situation of the Chinese Empire was daily becoming more critical, immediate consideration should be given to the question of the introduction of railways’ by which to augment the Imperial power. Japan it was pointed out, had already adopted Western mechanical arts, and her ruler, notwithstanding the diminutiveness of his territory, ‘relies upon the possession of railways to behave arrogantly toward China.’ Evidently, in the opinion of this triumvirate, the railway system was an indispensable adjunct to success in war, and their views have been verified to the letter.” In other words, the Japanese were coming to be aware that, with an increasingly comprehensive railway system in place and with China then having only a single line of any value, they held a distinct advantage in their capability for quick troop mustering and routine supply operations should hostilities break out on the Korean peninsula.

With uncanny prescience, Francis Trevithick wrote unknowingly in April 1894, “The time may not be so far distant when the Military Authorities will require the Railways; if so, to move two or three thousand troops in twenty-four hours will cause the Railways used, to be virtually closed to the public, and to move a larger body of troops within a very short notice could hardly be done. This would not be so if there was a double track.” Within months his prognostication had been proven correct. War broke out when Japan launched a surprise naval attack. Hostilities with China commenced on August 1, 1894.

Kanazawa station was on the IJGR’s Hokuriku line; an extension from the old Tsuruga terminus into the agricultural Hokuriku region that was a traditional “breadbasket” region of Japan although, given the crop yield, “ricebowl” would be a more accurate description. Construction commenced in the 1890s. This view from that era shows a busy station scene with a number of details of note, not the least of which are the two horse-drawn omnibuses waiting their departure times.

One of the major bridges on the Hokuriku Line was the span across the Jinzū River, where the line from Kanazawa reached Toyama. This early view of that bridge shows an express passenger train that appears to consist mainly of four-wheel stock crossing. Compare this typically American design “Pennsylvania” or “Petit Truss” bridge (from its prevalent used on the Pennsylvania Railroad) to the earlier examples shown. By the 1890s, bridge designs had taken on a distinct American flavor when compared to the earlier designs that were much more British in appearance.

The Hokuriku line’s Toyama station opened on March 20, 1899, and this postcard is an excellent view of the station and yard arrangement at the moment of an IJGR train departure, evidenced by the steam seen around the cylinders. To prevent damage to the locomotive cylinder heads that might be caused by water that had condensed in the cylinders while stopped, the drainage cocks were always opened when starting allowing the water (along with some steam) to escape, then closed by a cab-operated lever once the steam had sufficiently re-warmed the cylinders and the train was underway.

The segment of the Hokuriku line between Toyama and Uozu was opened in 1908, for which this commemorative postcard was issued. The route is shown below, while Toyama station (at right) and Uozu station (at left) are shown en vignettes, between which appears the IJGR mon. Notice how standardized station designs have been modernized.

At the war’s outset, the Imperial Chinese Navy had a distinct edge over its Japanese counterpart. Japan had realized that the possibility of a serious naval setback was very real and both its military and its railways had planned accordingly. A San’yo Tetsudō guide published after the war summarized,

“The celebrated Inland Sea of Japan, along the northern shore of which the [San’yo] line runs, furnishes to the navies of the Empire such a point of vantage and harbor of refuge as no other country in the world can boast Vast [sic] as it is in all its bays and windings, its three channels of approach are easily defended; from them in different directions, East, West, or South, the naval forces of the Empire can issue at will to strike at the enemy; while upon its northern shores the railway can bring to bear all the resources of the land.”

Hiroshima (the site of the closest major military base to the Asian Mainland in this protected position) was chosen as the General Headquarters for the war’s duration, and the San’yo would play the crucial role in providing logistical support all along the Inland Sea northern shore from Hiroshima to Kōbe, facilitating the re-supply, re-arming, and repairs of Imperial Japanese Navy ships if matters didn’t develop favorably for the Imperial Japanese Navy. In the event, these concerns never materialized, nevertheless, the San’yo played a major part in the war’s domestic logistics. Much of the movement, of course, was towards Hiroshima, Shimonoseki, and the Kyūshū ports of Sasebo and Nagasaki, nearest to Korea and China. Railways were immediately put into service supporting troop and supply movements. Unfortunately for the Japanese war effort, by 1894, the year of outbreak of hostilities, the San’yo Railway had succeeded in opening it’s mainline to Shimonoseki only as far west as Hiroshima. In fact, the new section to Hiroshima was opened just in the nick of time on June 10^th, a mere month and a half before the war’s start. As a result of Hiroshima being chosen to serve as General Headquarters, its port of Ujina, together with nearby Kure where a navy base had been established in 1889, were major points of troop embarkation. The bulk of troop and supporting personnel (largely porters, then quaintly known as “war coolies”) movements from points north were made by railway to Hiroshima. The Emperor himself moved his residence to Hiroshima during the pendency of the conflict, leaving Shimbashi via Imperial train on September 13^th, greeted along the route by droves of patriotic subjects who shouted their banzais as the train passed.

The government built the Ōū line from Fukushima to Aomori, partially along the Sea of Japan coast between Akita and Higashi-Noshiro, as part of the program envisioned in the 1892 Railway Law, which set forth the principle that every area of the realm was to be served by railway communication. In this view from around 1903, a later member of one of the earliest 2-4-0T tank locomotive classes is seen bringing a train of empty ballast wagons over a bridge running bunker first during construction, probably a Dubs or Stephenson locomotive.

One of the bridges in the outskirts of Yamagata is nearing completion in this winter photograph probably taken by a photographer engaged by the IJGR to document construction.

Traffic suffered considerable delays as troop trains brought the single tracked system almost to a standstill at times. Only 69 miles of railway line had been double tracked by the outbreak of hostilities. (The Shimbashi–Yokohama route of 18 miles, 11 miles from Kōbe to Nishinomiya, 22 miles of the Tokaidō in the mountainous stretch between Ōyama and Numazu, a mere 1¼ miles at the start of the San’yo line, and the first 16 miles of the Nippon Tetsudō from Ueno to Omiya.) The railways worked with patriotic vigor to handle the traffic that suddenly materialized, but the fact remained that the traffic levels at times were simply in excess of the amount of traffic a single-tracked system could handle. Numerous passenger trains had to be cancelled outright at times of greatest traffic. The military instantly realized the value that might have been gained from having the major trunk line constituents of the network (i.e., the Tokaidō-sen, Nippon, San’yo, and Kyūshū Railways) double-tracked. The army also quickly came to the realization that box cars built to the Japanese gauge would only fit 6 horses, standing lengthwise in 3 pairs, while in a typical European box car of the day 8 horses could be fitted in, standing widthwise (40 hommes, 8 chevaux foreshadowed...). One unforeseen result of the Sino-Japanese War was that the military became an ardent advocate of double-tracking and re-gauging the system to 1435mm (4’ 8½”) gauge.

Throughout the war, the absolute utility of the growing railway network was repeatedly demonstrated. As the Imperial Government Railway’s Annual Report for the 27^th Fiscal Year of Meiji (1894–1895) succinctly notes, “There never has been a time since the opening of railways in Japan when their merits have been more appreciated than during the war.” The number of troops alone, exclusive of “war coolies” and horses, amounted to 174,595 souls, the fares for which represented 8.35% of the gross revenues of the IJGR for the year, while war materiel and goods amounted to 43,445 tons representing 4.3% of total revenues. In short, during the years in question, one out of every eight yen the IJGR received in revenue were government funds paid on behalf of the Department of War. The various railways had never before been obliged to work so intensively as a unified system, but did their level best to coalesce into an integrated whole in order to support troop and materiel movements, and largely succeeded, given the strictures of the railway network then in place. A cutoff line from the Akabane semi-circle line was hurriedly built so that traffic movements flowed more quickly from the north through Tōkyō to the south without having to move through Shinagawa station; at the Kōbe shops, car repairs were put on hold to free up shop space for the construction of new cars desperately needed to handle the increased traffic. Deferred maintenance became routine as staff was stretched thin and timetables bulged with special trains.

Yamagata, the capital of Yamagata prefecture, was the first major city the Ōū Line reached after crossing the mountains on its way from Fukushima, some 50 miles distant. The city is situated in a long valley running northward almost to the prefectural border with Akita that the line would follow. Yamagata station was opened in 1901. In this Edwardian view, an ordinary passenger train of four-wheel stock is apparently about to start, as steam can be seen escaping from the safety valves behind the polished brass dome of locomotive 149, indicating a robust fire has been laid on and a good head of steam built up preparatory to departure.

Tsuchizaki was a small locale about 4.5 kilometers from Akita. As Akita was one of the largest cities at about mid-point on the new Ōū line, it made a logical place to construct the locomotive and carriage repair and maintenance facilities that would be needed for the new line. A suitable expanse of undeveloped land was located at Tsuchizaki, adjacent to the new right of way, and the complex show here was built. This photo then bears witness to how a major regional railway repair and maintenance facility of late Meiji would have appeared.

At the conclusion of the Sino-Japanese War and the Treaty of Shimonoseki in 1895, a victorious Emperor returned to Tōkyō from Hiroshima, which had served as General Staff headquarters during the war and where the Emperor had gone to instill morale among his troops, living in two spartanly furnished rooms for the war’s duration. This view shows an IJGR A8 class locomotive as decorated to haul the Imperial Train back to Tōkyō in triumph. The Victorian era was the golden age of elaborately decorated locomotives for special occasions, and Japan readily took to the custom. Note the polished brass Kiku-no-gomon Imperial badge on the tank side, the Joy’s radial valve gear, and the diamond builder’s plate, identifying it as a Dubs product. The relative luxury of the Imperial Carriage, shown elsewhere, must have been welcomed after a long sojourn on a military base.

At this time in Japan, most train movements on the whole of the railway system were worked upon the British “ticket and staff” system for special trains. The traffic management situation was not all that changed from the time of the Satsuma Rebellion almost 20 years hence, but traffic had greatly increased. If three southbound troop trains were waiting at a station to use the next portion of line, the first two trains (or as many others as were waiting and could be “gotten through,” save for the last train) were given a “ticket” that they had to carry on to the station which marked the end of a segment and on arrival were obliged to wait at that station until the last of the three trains, carrying the “line staff,” a baton which, when carried on a train, represented the right to use the particular line correlative to the staff. In effect, each “ticketed” train was the equivalent of a “section” of the final train. No northbound train would be allowed to enter that segment of line until the third and final train carrying the staff had entered the station, at which point the staff would be handed over to the station master to give to the driver of the next northbound train and the whole process would begin again anew with that northbound train carrying the staff back along its section. As Francis Trevithick conceded, this system was not without its faults: “One drawback is that the sections have of necessity to be short in order to avoid serious delays, and the train staff may be at one end of the section, while a train is waiting for it at the other.” Adoption of the American telegraph dispatch system of traffic management would have greatly improved matters, but wartime is obviously not the optimum circumstances to choose for the introduction of a radically new system of traffic management to an already convulsed railway network.

As can be imagined, in time of war, with additional troop and supply train movements, the result must at times have been near chaos. Workings under such conditions must have strained the fledgling system to the breaking point. Matters did not always proceed smoothly. On the night of July 24, 1894, a train of returning wounded carrying over 380 troops, doctors and nurses left Hiroshima northbound during a severe gale. Unbeknownst to the staff, the gale had washed out one of the seaside embankments on which the tracks ran and just after passing Mihara Station, around 1 a.m. in blindingly poor visibility, the train came upon the washed-out section and the locomotive and 13 out of 25 carriages were plunged into the sea, at a loss of life of some 16 passengers plus the driver and fireman killed. Presumably, the local track crew was simply stretched too thin to have been conducting adequate safety checks along the line.

At the beginning of the war, Japan’s army was very much more modern than the Chinese army, while China’s navy was as modern as Japan’s and possessed more and heavier ships; hence one of the reasons behind the surprise naval attack. Japan succeeded in neutralizing the Chinese navy and capturing Lüshun (Port Arthur) on the Liaodong peninsula and Wei Hai Wei, the two Chinese naval bases guarding the entrance to the Gulf of Pechili (Bo Hai). On land, the Japanese army proved more than the master of its Chinese opponent with its push northward up the Korean peninsula and into Manchuria, threatening the very ancestral home of China’s Manchurian Ch’ing dynasty. Part of the Japanese army’s success of course was attributable to the fact that ethnic Han Chinese enlistees of the Chinese army were less than sanguine in fighting a war viewed as the affair of the ‘foreign’ Manchurian Ch’ing dynasty. Once Wei Hai Wei and Lüshun were in Japanese hands, and the Chinese Army in Korea had capitulated, the land route to Beijing lay open to Japan. The Manchu dynasty had little choice but to sue for peace, and after a series of tragicomic diplomatic maneuvers on the part of the Chinese, serious negotiations for a settlement proceeded and a treaty was signed at Shimonoseki between the Li Hong-zhang, the Chinese plenipotentiary, and the very same Itō Hirobumi who had negotiated and overseen financial arrangements for the first Tōkyō– Yokohama line in 1871 and who by 1895 was Prime Minister. The Emperor himself was present for the final ceremonials. On conclusion of the Treaty of Shimonoseki, the Emperor rode back to Tōkyō in his state train pulled for part of its trip by a British-built A8 class 2-4-2T tank locomotive decorated appropriately for his triumphant progress.

One can perhaps understand why, after the war, the military started to flex its muscle increasingly on the Railway Council, as the railway system had come uncomfortably close to some serious problems in its darkest operating moments during the war. Nevertheless, there had never been a single failure of major proportions, and the railways more than proved their mettle during the two years’ hostilities. The war had vindicated of the wisdom of having selected the Tokaidō route over the Nakasendō route, for, as Inoue was quick to realize, the selection of the Tokaidō route permitted the integration of the railway network in 1889, while the two railway systems of the Kansai and Kantō regions wouldn’t have been linked during the war if the Nakasendō route, which would have still been uncompleted, had been chosen. Railways, as the Chinese themselves had noted, were one of the factors working to give the edge to Japan in their struggle against the Chinese, as the Japanese had less difficulty supplying their Army in the field than did the Chinese who, after expulsion from Korea, were fighting on their own soil.

Odate Station, on one of the last segments of the Ōū line, was opened on November 15, 1899, part of a portion of the line that was built running from Aomori southwards to meet the line being built northward from Fukushima. The station was probably some two decades old when this photo was taken, judging from the several electric lamps to be seen in the photo and what appears to be a 9600 class locomotive standing to the left of the engine house.

In the year the war ended, a less remarkable event that was the harbinger of a technology that would have a profound impact on future development of railways in Japan took place when the Kyōto-shi Tetsudō opened on February first. As part of a scheme to link Kyōto with Lake Biwa by canal (complete with a funicular railway at the Kyōto end and a canal tunnel), a hydroelectric generating plant had been built, and Kyōto joined Tōkyō to be one of the first cities in Japan to have electric power. The promoters of this new line made the decision to import new technology from America for the line’s motive power: electric trolley cars from the Brill Company of Philadelphia, the importation of which served as the arrival of the first electric railway equipment in Japan. In 1895, the average speed of a Japanese passenger train, because of the gauge, traffic restrictions due to single tracking, and other matters, was on average 18½ miles an hour. 25 miles an hour was only rarely exceeded, although on a level line such as the Yokohama–Shimbashi line where schedules were being worked more smartly in order to cope with ever-increasing traffic demands, 40 miles per hour was occasionally met. With electric traction, the potential for speed (quicker acceleration permitted faster average times) was a possibility. Also in that year, the government purchasing procedures for railway equipment was fundamentally altered. Originally, it had been customary for requirements to be sent in batches to London. 1895 saw the adoption of a competitive bidding system based in Tōkyō. American and German railway equipment and locomotive manufacturers often had local agents in Tōkyō, while few British manufacturers did. The new procedures gave and advantage to those who did, of course, and also made the process easier for budding local manufacturers. By the end of 1895, a new epoch was underway.

The Keage Incline, outside Kyōtō, was a funicular railway built to haul canal boats between segments of the Lake Biwa Canal, a water route linking Kyōtō with Lake Biwa, commenced in 1885 and completed in 1890. At the time, the 600 meter incline was said to be the longest in the world. In the first of these late 1890s scenes, a canal boat leaves the base of the incline for its ascent, the second shows the approach to the summit, while in the third another boat is being hauled along as two Kyōtō Municipal Railway trolleys trundle by. Kyōtō was the first city in Japan to introduce electric traction to Japan in 1895, in part because the Lake Biwa Canal project provided an excellent opportunity for including a hydro-electric generating station, rendering Kyōtō among the first cities in Japan to have electric power. The gauge of the Keage Incline was 9 feet, so that the cars would be wide enough to accommodate canal boats. The entire enterprise became something of a tourist attraction and sightseers were able to ride its 11-mile length in the canal boats. To the author’s knowledge the Keage Incline 9’ gauge was the widest ever commercially used world-wide. Parts of the Lake Biwa canal funicular right of way and cars still exist to be seen.

Short wheelbase end-platform passenger carriages in the manner of the earliest Shimbashi line stock were often to be seen on the lines that were built on the eastern side of Tōkyō Bay. In this view an A8 type locomotive is hauling a train over one of the river bridges in the vicinity of Chiba, either on the Sōbu Tetsudō or the Bōsō Tetsudō (both used A8 types and both lines met at Chiba). Notice the central baggage compartment of the first car, effectively splitting it into two compartments.

B6 class locomotive number 1090 is seen hard at work on the front end of a double-headed freight train passing through an unidentified station in the late 1890s. The rather prominent signal cabin (by Meiji standards) would seem to indicate a relatively large station with a larger than average yard that required more comprehensive control of the turnouts and signals.

It must have been a gloriously hot day when this photograph was taken: almost every window on the train seen here is open, as no reflection from any glass is discernible. Even the baggage car doors have been thrown open wide in an attempt to enjoy the ventilation created as the train crosses the cool precincts of the upcoming river. The location in the photograph has not been identified, but it is most likely on the IJGR Tokaidō line.

A San’yo train pulls into Maiko station as a track gang at left hefts a length of rail to the waiting pile at their feet. The scene is representative of small stations along the San’yo route.