Makuharihongo

When I was a child on Teeside in the north of England we had an area like this between Middlesborough and Thornaby. It was locally known as 'The Wilderness'and was the area where all the coke and ore trains tying up for Dorman Long steelworks were berthed. So I have a soft spot for this kind of panorama which probably isn't shared by many.

These are some of the outer 'parking tracks' at Makuharihongo Depot, the biggest and most important JR site on the east side of Tokyo. The picture is taken from a bridge I often use as a short cut doing my field studies and I could spend hours lurking up here on a nice day. Gricing heaven! On the far left is the Sobu Line 'down' fast for Chiba and away over to the right beyond the trains is the 'up' fast for Tokyo and the slow lines. Also the Keisei Railway tracks, which run parallel to JR here. So there's a heck of a lot of railway around - I think 22 tracks in total running unter this bridge!

Here in a picture taken on a muggy day a year ago is a selection of typical Chiba area power - including three old 183 Class units now of blessed memory.

The pylons to the left may look like any old pylons to you but they follow the line of one of the first long distance power distribution routes in Japan - they appear on a map of this area made in 1918. Needless to say most of the rest of the view would have been fields at the time.