Main Tōkaidō line

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Main Tōkaidō line
Between Hayakawa and Nebukawa (Kanagawa Prefecture)
Between Hayakawa and Nebukawa (Kanagawa Prefecture)
Route length: 589.5 km
Gauge : 1067 mm ( cape track )
Power system : 1500 V  =
Top speed: 130 km / h
Dual track : whole route
Companies: JR East , JR Central ,
JR West , JR Freight

The Tōkaidō main line ( Japanese 東海 道 本 線 , Tōkaidō-honsen ) is a railway line in Japan . It is named after the historic Tōkaidō Street of the same name and is one of the most important traffic routes in the country. The railway line opens up the metropolitan areas on or near the south coast of the main island of Honshu . It begins in Tokyo and leads via Yokohama , Shizuoka , Nagoya , Kyōto and Osaka to Kobe . It connects Kantō , Chūbu and Kansai , the most populous regions of Japan.

Passenger transport is the responsibility of three companies in the JR Group : JR East , JR Central and JR West . The distance between the two end points is 589.5 km. There are also several branch lines, which mainly serve the freight traffic of JR Freight . The entire Tōkaidō main line is cape gauge (1067 mm), two to four tracks and electrified with 1500 V DC .

The section between Tokyo and Yokohama, opened in 1872, is the oldest railway line in Japan. In 1889, the Tōkaidō main line was completed, although the route in parts no longer corresponds to today's. The electrification of the entire route was completed in 1956. Since, despite this measure, it reached its capacity limits, the Tōkaidō Shinkansen , the world's first high-speed line , was built in parallel . Since its opening in 1964, the number of national express trains has decreased significantly and the Tōkaidō main line is now primarily used for commuter and freight traffic.

Overview

This article deals with the general characteristics and history of the main Tōkaidō line. More detailed information on the route, the train stations and the train service can be found in the following sub-articles:

description

The Tōkaidō main line laid in Cape Gauge (1067 mm) extends between Tokyo and Kobe over a distance of 589.5 km. It is continuously electrified with 1500 V DC and provides access to 154 passenger train stations. The route is double-tracked throughout . The sections Tokyo - Yokohama - Odawara (83.9 km), Nagoya - Inazawa (11.1 km) and Kusatsu - Kyōto - Osaka - Kobe (98.1 km) have been expanded with three or more tracks . The maximum speed is 130 km / h on the Maibara- Kobe section , otherwise 110 or 120 km / h.

Since the privatization of the Japanese State Railways on April 1, 1987, JR Freight has been responsible for all freight traffic on the Tōkaidō main line. Passenger transport is divided into three sections, each of which is managed by a company in the JR Group :

In the metropolitan areas, freight and passenger traffic are usually operationally separate from one another. This is done either through parallel tracks or through separate railway lines for freight traffic, the routing of which sometimes deviates significantly. In the Tokyo / Yokohama area, for example, the Tōkaidō freight line takes on this task; together with several branches it is 88.5 km long. The Umeda freight line and the Hoppō freight line in the greater Osaka area reach a length of 12.6 km and 12.2 km, respectively. Important freight stations are located in Gifu , Kawasaki , Kyōto, Nagoya, Nishi- Hamamatsu , Ōiso , Osaka, Shinagawa , Suita and Yokohama-Hazawa. The ports of Kawasaki, Kobe, Nagoya, Tokyo and Yokohama are also connected.

Surname

The name Tōkaidō main line goes back to the Tōkaidō ( Japanese東海 道; dt. "Eastern sea route"), the historical post and trade route between the Shōgunate seat of government Edo (today Tokyo ) and the imperial capital Kyoto . This name in turn is derived from the Tōkai region . The railway line was Japan's first and roughly followed the course of the road, which is why the name was obvious. The name has held up to this day, but is officially only used for part of the Tokyo – Kobe connection. In the Tokyo area, it refers to the express trains between Tokyo and Tokfuna stations ; the partly parallel local traffic is taken over by the Keihin-Tōhoku Line , the Shōnan-Shinjuku Line , the Yamanote Line and the Yokosuka Line . The railway company JR West uses the names Biwako Line , JR Kyōto Line and JR Kobe Line for parts of its route .

history

The first Japanese railway

Edmund Morel planned the first section

In 1866 the Tokugawa Shogunate planned to build a railway line between Kyoto and Edo (today's Tokyo ). It had a possible route measured and sent young officials to Europe to study railway technology there. However, the political and financial situation in Japan was far too uncertain for such an undertaking and the project was therefore postponed indefinitely. At the end of 1867, shortly before the fall of the shogunate , the American diplomat Anton Portman received permission to build the Edo – Yokohama line . The government reserved the right to buy back the route at a later date. The Boshin War , which broke out in January 1868 and marked the beginning of the Meiji Restoration , thwarted these plans.

After the change of government, it was Great Britain that was able to develop the best relations with the new imperial government. This hired the diplomat Horatio Nelson Lay in December 1869 as a " foreign contractor " to help in arranging a loan in the amount of one million pounds . This was intended to finance the first railway lines and telegraph lines. Lay made the government believe he would raise the money through private investors. Instead, he issued Japanese government bonds on the London Stock Exchange - with the intention of directing part of the interest income to his private account. The government discovered the attempted fraud, revoked the contract in June 1870 and instead hired the Oriental Bank in London to raise capital.

Depiction of the first railway in Yokohama on a woodcut by Utagawa Kunisada II.

On the recommendation of the British Ambassador Harry Smith Parkes , the government appointed Edmund Morel as chief engineer of the first section. Morel began surveying and overseeing the earthworks in April 1870. He determined Shimbashi in Tokyo and Sakuragichō in Yokohama as endpoints . Whether it was he who set the Cape gauge of 1067 mm as the Japanese standard gauge cannot be said with certainty. It is possible, especially since he had previously built lines with the same gauge in New Zealand . Despite his poor health, he worked tirelessly, teaching the Japanese assistants and workers all aspects of track construction. He died of tuberculosis in November 1871 ; his influence on the Japanese railway system was so lasting that his grave in Yokohama is now a railway monument .

Japan's first railroad was provisionally put into operation on June 12, 1872 between Yokohama and Shinagawa , initially with six pairs of trains a day. The completion of the missing section to Shimbashi was delayed due to the resistance of the Imperial Japanese Army , which did not tolerate the construction of a route on their premises. After a compromise, an alternative route could be built over a dam through the mud flats on the edge of Tokyo Bay . Finally, on October 14, 1872, the official opening by Emperor Meiji took place. He drove the 29 km long route in an imperial car specially built for the occasion. In the first full year of operation in 1873, 1,223,071 passengers were counted; the introduction of freight traffic was a long time coming until September 15, 1873.

Completion of the route

The next section to be built was the connection between the important trading city of Osaka and the new port of Kobe . The survey was completed at the end of 1871, but the start of construction was delayed by around two years due to organizational problems and the lack of suitable personnel. While the route Tokyo – Yokohama presented hardly any difficulties, several rivers had to be crossed here. In three cases, the river bed was up to twelve meters higher than the surrounding landscape due to the centuries-long deposition of sediments , so that the rivers had to be tunnelled. The opening took place on May 11, 1874. The line reached a temporary station near Kyoto on September 5, 1876 , and the city center on February 6, 1877. That the emperor traveled to Kyoto to make the official opening was considered a strong one political signal, because the Satsuma rebellion had broken out a few days earlier . In the following months, the railroad proved to be extremely useful for troop transports, which contributed to the rapid suppression of the rebellion. The army also gave up its resistance to further railway projects.

East portal of the Ōsakayama tunnel (in operation until 1921)

The 18 km long section from Kyōto to Ōtsu at the southern end of Lake Biwa, approved in August 1878, was the first to be entirely under Japanese management. This was made possible by the first graduates from an engineering school in Osaka. The centerpiece of the route was the first railway tunnel through a mountain, the 646 m long Ōsakayama tunnel , which took eleven and a half months to build. On July 15, 1880, the first trains to Ōtsu ran. From May 1, 1882, a steamship connected Ōtsu with Nagahama on the northeast bank of Lake Biwa, where there was a connection to Tsuruga . Exactly a year later, the railway ran from Nagahama to Sekigahara and finally on May 25, 1885 to Ōgaki on the northwestern edge of the Nōbi plain . From there, Nagoya could be reached via a canal system.

For the missing section between Ōgaki and Tokyo, the army advocated a route inland along the Nakasendō over the Usui Pass , far from the coast and thus easier to defend in the event of war. The large cities of Nagoya and Shizuoka were to be connected with branch lines. In June 1885 the government approved plans. A year later, after more detailed investigations, the Railway Authority came to the conclusion that the construction of this route (which corresponds in parts to today's Shin'etsu main line ) would take more than ten years due to numerous necessary tunnels and would exceed the financial possibilities of the state. The government ignored the wishes of the army and decided in July 1886 to build the railway line near the coast.

The further construction of the railway along the Tōkaidō went faster than originally assumed. In the west, the branch line from the south bank of the Kiso via Nagoya to Atsuta on the coast (today a southern district of Nagoya) had existed since March 1, 1886 . From Ōgaki the route reached Gifu on January 21, 1887 , and on April 25, 1887 the gap between Gifu and Kiso was closed. In the east, the line reached Kōzu station on July 11, 1887 from Yokohama . On September 10, 1887, the connection Atsuta - Hamamatsu followed . It continued on February 1, 1889 from Kōzu to Shizuoka , but the route via Atami was not chosen. Instead, the route made a detour via today's Gotemba line to bypass the Hakone mountain range . With the opening of the Hamamatsu – Shizuoka section on April 16, 1889, the route was almost complete. The only thing missing was the section along Lake Biwa to make ferry traffic superfluous. This gap was closed on July 1, 1889, together with a more direct route between Maibara and Sekigahara. The only pair of trains per day that traveled the entire route between Tokyo and Kobe without changing took 20 hours and 5 minutes.

Expansion and capacity increase

Construction of the Tanna tunnel
C10 steam locomotive in Kyoto Station (1938)

The Mino Owari earthquake on October 28, 1891 caused severe damage to the railway line in the prefectures of Aichi and Shizuoka . 63 bridges were destroyed, in 45 places the embankment sank by up to four meters. As a result, rail traffic between Maibara and Hamamatsu was interrupted for five and a half months. In 1895 the line between Tokyo-Shimbashi and Kobe was officially referred to as the "Tōkaido Line" (Tōkaido-sen) for the first time . In September 1896 the first express train ran between the two cities. Sleeper trains followed in 1900, dining cars in 1901. The express trains led to a significant reduction in travel time: in 1896 it was 17 hours and 9 minutes for the entire length, in 1903 it fell to 15 hours, in 1906 to 13 hours and 40 minutes. As early as 1876, work had begun to double-track short sections . Five years later, the expansion between Shimbashi and Yokohama was completed. Further extensions followed from 1891 and dragged on for two decades. With the new construction of the bridge over the Tenryū , the entire Tōkaidō main line was double-tracked in 1913.

After its opening on December 20, 1914, Tokyo station was the new terminus in Tokyo, the old Shimbashi terminus then served as a freight station. During the Taishō period , the Ministry of Railways set itself the goal of optimizing the alignment of individual sections through leveling and longer tunnels in order to increase the efficiency of the Tōkaidō main line. In 1921 it replaced the Ōsakayama tunnel with two longer tunnels. The steeply steep detour via Gotemba in particular proved to be the bottleneck , which is why a shortcut south of the Hakone mountain range was to be created. In April 1918, work began on the 7,804 m long Tanna tunnel between Atami and Numazu . Since it leads through the tectonically unstable foothills of the Taga volcano with several faults , there were repeated collapses and water ingress. After numerous delays, the tunnel could not be put into operation until December 1, 1934. It replaced the Atami Railway along the west coast of Sagami Bay . The Great Kantō earthquake on September 1, 1923 caused great damage and also triggered the devastating Nebukawa railway accident that claimed 112 lives.

The electrification of the Tōkaidō main line was initially limited to suburban traffic. From 1925 railcars operated from Yokohama to Kōzu, three years later their operation was extended to the Tokyo – Atami section. With the opening of the Tanna tunnel in 1934, the contact wire reached Numazu. From the same year the suburban traffic between Suita (near Osaka) and Kobe was electric, from 1937 between Suita and Kyōto. The outbreak of the Pacific War resulted in an enormous increase in freight traffic. Long-distance trains were severely restricted, dining and sleeping cars were temporarily taken out of service. In 1939, the Ministry of Railways planned to build a standard gauge "new trunk line" (shinkansen) between Tokyo and Shimonoseki to facilitate freight traffic to the Asian mainland. Construction work began in September 1940, but the project had to be abandoned after a short time. The only exception was the Nihonzaka tunnel, which opened in 1944: it was used by trains on the Tōkaidō main line until 1962, and has been used by Shinkansen high-speed trains since 1964 .

The Allied air strikes caused severe damage to the rail infrastructure. After the capitulation of Japan in 1945, only a reduced operation could be maintained for several years due to a lack of electrical energy and coal. In 1948 the express train service was resumed, with the Tsubame as the actual parade train. One of the most important projects of the Japanese State Railways (JNR), founded in 1949, was the complete electrification of the massively overloaded Tōkaidō main line. Although it only made up 3% of the entire rail network, it had to handle 24% of the traffic volume. In the same year the section Numazu – Shizuoka – Hamamatsu was energized, in 1953 the Hamamatsu – Nagoya– Inazawa section followed , and in 1956 the Inazawa – Maibara section. With the conversion of the Maibara – Kyōto section, the project was completed on November 19, 1956.

Further development

Express train in Osaka Station (1978)

Despite the electrification, the Tōkaidō main line continued to reach its capacity limits due to the onset of the economic boom. JNR President Sogō Shinji therefore energetically pushed ahead with the project of a standard - gauge high - speed line from 1958 . After five years of construction, the Tōkaidō Shinkansen between Tokyo and Osaka was inaugurated on October 1, 1964. The new connection massively reduced travel times: on the old route, the fastest train previously needed 6 hours and 40 minutes between the two largest cities in Japan. The Shinkansen required four hours for this, from 1965 even only 3 hours and 10 minutes. For this reason, the national long-distance traffic shifted to a large extent to the Shinkansen. Numerous express trains were discontinued or limited to partial routes. Only a few night trains still run the entire route. In contrast, the importance of the Tōkaidō main line in commuter traffic, which now had more capacity, increased significantly.

The state railroad supplemented the Tōkaidō main line with several branch and bypass routes in order to disentangle the freight traffic from the passenger traffic; its heart is the Tōkaidō freight line in the Tokyo / Yokohama area. It also opened several new train stations in urban areas. With the privatization of the state railways on April 1, 1987, four new companies took their place. While JR East , JR Central and JR West took over the passenger traffic on the route sections assigned to them, the entire freight traffic fell under the responsibility of JR Freight . The JR companies also expanded their range of services with a denser timetable and the opening of new stations. The JR Tōzai Line , opened in 1997, enables direct connections to the Fukuchiyama Line in central Osaka . Since 2015, local trains that had their terminus at Tokyo station have been able to continue to the north of the metropolitan region via the newly built Ueno-Tokyo line .

Important train stations

Tokyo train station
Kyoto station
Osaka train station
Surname km location place prefecture
Tokyo ( 東京 ) 000.0 Coord. Tokyo Tokyo
Shinagawa ( 品 川 ) 006.8 Coord.
Yokohama ( 横 浜 ) 028.8 Coord. Yokohama Kanagawa
Ōfuna ( 大船 ) 046.5 Coord. Kamakura
Odawara ( 小田原 ) 083.9 Coord. Odawara
Atami ( 熱 海 ) 104.6 Coord. Atami Shizuoka
Mishima ( 三島 ) 120.7 Coord. Mishima
Fuji ( 富士 ) 146.2 Coord. Fuji
Shizuoka ( 静岡 ) 180.2 Coord. Shizuoka
Kakegawa ( 掛 川 ) 229.3 Coord. Kakegawa
Hamamatsu ( 浜 松 ) 257.1 Coord. Hamamatsu
Toyohashi ( 豊 橋 ) 293.6 Coord. Toyohashi Aichi
Mikawa-Anjō ( 三河 安 城 ) 336.3 Coord. Anjō
Nagoya ( 名古屋 ) 366.0 Coord. Nagoya
Gifu ( 岐阜 ) 396.3 Coord. Gifu Gifu
Maibara ( 米 原 ) 445.9 Coord. Maibara Shiga
Kyoto ( 京都 ) 513.6 Coord. Kyoto Kyoto
Takatsuki ( 京都 ) 535.2 Coord. Takatsuki Osaka
Shin-Osaka ( 京都 ) 552.6 Coord. Osaka
Osaka ( 大阪 ) 556.4 Coord.
Sannomiya ( 三 ノ 宮 ) 587.0 Coord. Kobe Hyogo
Kobe ( 神 戸 ) 589.5 Coord.

literature

  • Dan Free: Early Japanese Railways 1853-1914: Engineering Triumphs That Transformed Meiji-era Japan . Turtle Publishing, Clarendon 2014, ISBN 978-4-8053-1290-2 .

Web links

Commons : Tōkaidō main line  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ The Tokaido Line. Deep Japan, July 6, 2013, accessed July 31, 2018 .
  2. ↑ Free: Early Japanese Railways 1853-1914. Pp. 29-30.
  3. ↑ Free: Early Japanese Railways 1853-1914. Pp. 31-33.
  4. ↑ Free: Early Japanese Railways 1853-1914. Pp. 59-61.
  5. ↑ Free: Early Japanese Railways 1853-1914. Pp. 64-65.
  6. ↑ Free: Early Japanese Railways 1853-1914. Pp. 67-68.
  7. ↑ Free: Early Japanese Railways 1853-1914. P. 74.
  8. ↑ Free: Early Japanese Railways 1853-1914. Pp. 77-80.
  9. ↑ Free: Early Japanese Railways 1853-1914. P. 84.
  10. ↑ Free: Early Japanese Railways 1853-1914. P. 87.
  11. ↑ Free: Early Japanese Railways 1853-1914. Pp. 94-96, 99.
  12. ↑ Free: Early Japanese Railways 1853-1914. Pp. 101-104.
  13. ↑ Free: Early Japanese Railways 1853-1914. P. 107.
  14. ↑ Free: Early Japanese Railways 1853-1914. Pp. 110-111.
  15. ↑ Free: Early Japanese Railways 1853-1914. Pp. 125-127.
  16. ↑ Free: Early Japanese Railways 1853-1914. P. 132.
  17. ↑ Free: Early Japanese Railways 1853-1914. Pp. 163-164.
  18. ↑ a b c d e f Naoki Tanemura: 日本 を 支 え た 動脈 東海 道 線 100 年 の 歩 み . In: Railway Journal . No. 271 . Tetsudō jānaru sha, Chiyoda May 1989 (Japanese).
  19. ^ Eiichi Aoki: Japanese Railway History: Growth of Independent Technologiy. (PDF, 1.5 MB) In: Japan Railway & Transport Review. East Japan Railway Culture Foundation, October 1994, accessed July 31, 2018 .
  20. ↑ Shigeru Onoda: A History of Railway Tunnels in Japan. (PDF, 2.8 MB) In: Breakthrough in Japanese Railways 14th East Japan Railway Culture Foundation, October 2015, pp. 40–42 , accessed on July 31, 2018 (English).
  21. ^ Yasuo Wakuda: Japanese Railway History: Wartime Railways and Transport Policies. (PDF, 817 kB) (No longer available online.) In: Japan Railway & Transport Review. East Japan Railway Culture Foundation, November 1996, archived from the original on July 1, 2016 ; accessed on July 31, 2018 (English). Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.jrtr.net
  22. ^ History of Shinkansen. In: Shinkansen Bullet Train. Encyclopedia Japan, accessed July 31, 2018 .