JR Freight

Here's a picture that I meant to post yesterday but the 'Blogger' photo upload seems to be regularly out of action these days. Anyway, it's working now!

Freight is something that you don't often hear mentioned in the context of Japanese railways. Actually the serivce is quite like the UK (and of course very unlike North America!). Here the old-style van load stuff vanished as it did in England in the 1960's leaving the old JNR with some incredibly valuable redundant real estate around Tokyo and other major cities.

It was replaced by a freightliner container operation which is quite busy and now run as a separate JR division, although it suprises me in a country as long and crowded as Japan that there aren't more trains. Of course being Japan the service is run to the second, with trains timetabled between passenger services on some main lines. That is what happens on our side of Tokyo, where the service between Shinkoiwa and the steel town of Kashiwa dovetails with expresses to Narita on the Sobu line.

Here is one of those trains coming through Monoi in charge of the usual EF65. These are interesting engines and I'll post a close up sometime - to get over the low axle load problems they have three bogies - one in the middle! So this is actually a Bo-Bo-Bo!