Shimada Railway
| Shimada Railway | |||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| Route length: | 2.94 km | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Gauge : | 610 mm ( 2 foot track ) | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
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The Shimada Railway ( Japanese 島 田 軌道 , Shimada kidō ) was a narrow-gauge hand-operated train on the Japanese island of Honshū . In the field of city Shimada in Shizuoka prefecture located, this 2.94 km long route was exclusively for freight traffic. It existed from 1898 to 1959 and thus had the longest operating life of all hand-operated railways in Japan.
history
For a long time the Ōi River has been an important transportation route for rafting . After the opening of the Tōkaidō main line in 1889, the raftsmen no longer drove to the mouth of the Suruga Bay , but landed at a pier called Mukuya. From there, the wood was transported by cart to Shimada train station , where it was then loaded onto freight trains or processed in the local wood and paper industry. This soon proved to be inefficient, which is why in July 1896 a group of business people asked for a railway operating license for a manually operated railway. The city council wanted to build the railway on its own and initially refused, but changed its mind on December 15, 1897.
The Shimada kidō company was founded on January 18, 1898 and immediately afterwards began building the track. Almost three months later, operations began on April 13, 1898. The 2.94 km long route with a gauge of 610 mm had its starting point next to the pier and led in a south-easterly direction to the train station. During its heyday in the 1930s, the railway owned 40 freight cars. These mainly transported wood, but also chemicals for wood processing. Officially there was no passenger transport, but for a tip for the pushers, people could be taken on the car.
After 62 years, the Shimada Railway was shut down on September 30, 1959. It had been in operation longer than any other hand-operated railroad in Japan, but it had also become an anachronism in view of the mass motorization in the post-war period.
Web links
- General information about the Shimada Railway (Japanese)
- Photos of the previous route (Japanese)
literature
- Keisuke Imao: 日本 鉄 道 旅行 地 図 帳 (Japan Rail Travel Atlas ) . tape 7 Tōkai. Shinchosha, Tokyo 2008, ISBN 978-4-10-790025-8 .