Wonder of the modern world
JAPAN | Friday, 17 June 2005 | Views [625]
The trains here take the concept of punctuality to the absurd. On the way to meet some friends we were down on a platform in Shibuya waiting for the 15:41.
As the train drew into the station I thought "it's early", but then, as we watched the second counter blink the seconds, the station clock clicked over to 15:41 literally as the train came to a complete stop, accurate to a few centimetres with doors perfectly aligned to the queues of waiting travellers.
Japan Railways never ceases to innovate either. Some carriages have almost no seats and those that are fold up automatically during rush hours in an uncanny resemblance to a cattle truck. Other carriages are reserved just for women and still others are full of soft padded bouncy children's playground furniture, which Riu loved and provides me a great way to meet other parents and practise my limited Japanese.
The sheer size of the rail network is almost incomprehensible moving about 10 million people in and out of Tokyo each day. It works because it has to. When they need to re-develop a station, they don't (can't) just board it up for a few months while the work gets done. In Funabashi they are literally building the new station through and around the current one, while it is still in use, which is a quite amazing piece of engineering and planning.
But some of the solutions to punctuality are decidedly low-tech: each train driver carries a stop-watch that they synchronise when they arrive at work each morning. This they carry with them all day on every train they operate, and on the dashboard of each train there is a little indented spot for this stop-watch to sit, ensuring that the drivers focus on and operate the trains to exactly the same schedule across the city.
Tags: travel with children, trains, transport, tokyo, mystery
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