Chiba City Monorail

Chiba cty has quite an extensive monorail system. The 'main line' runs from the Prefectural offices through the city centre to the main station and then around the north of town in a loop to a terminus out east in Wakaba-ku. A short branch, the first leg of an anticipated extension towards Midori-ku, branches off at the main station and heads down past City Hall to JR Chiba Minato station.

I's a cute system, around 12 miles and about a dozen stations. A lot of people from Inage and further out do use it to commute into the city centre, but I can't belive it's remotely profitable. This kind of project was very popular before the economic balloon burst in 1993, Japanese bureaucrats loved these kind of toys as a 'legacy' to hand down to their long suffering tax payers.

All the trains on the Chiba system are two cars,like the one approaching Tsuga seen here in the picture. In some places they get up to around 40 mph which feels plenty fast enough to me that high up in the air and they give you a curious sense of 'flying by train' when they get moving too. If you are scared of flying here's something to practice with!

Oh! But then you would need to fly to Japan first eh?