Tokaido Line

A lot of people have heard of the Tokaido Line but maybe most of them are pretty hazy as to what it is.

The Tokaido was one of the ancient highways of Japan, running between Kyoto and Edo (now Tokyo). The name literally means "Eastern Sea Route" TheTokaido line was Japan's first main line joining those two cities built back in the 1880's and it largely follows the route of the road south and west down to Shizuoka and Nagoya. But then the railway headed up to Lake Biwa and west to Kyoto - the old road crossed the bay by ferry and ran through Mie Prefecture.

In the 1960's the parallel Tokaido Shinkansen ") ("New trunk route")was lbuit. It too follows the old railway for much of the way but of course takes a lot of liberties with tunneling through mountains etc. not possible eighty years before.

You can still travel on the Tokaido line from Tokyo down to Kyoto but not (with a few interesting exceptions I'll mention later) by through express. JR don't compete with themselves on parallel routes. So now most of the very busy Tokaido line traffic is fairly local kaisoku fast trains. From Tokyo you ususally catch them down to Odawara, and then change trains to go further west.

So these Tokaido Line platforms at Tokyo station have come down in the world over the years. No longer do JNR C57 Pacifics pull out with expresses to the west - to get the shinkansen you need to go a few platforms across from here. But when I'm gricing at Tokyo |I still sense the ghosts of expresses long departed from platform 9 here.