Kyōto (京都市) Steam Engines and Other Trains

Being slightly disappointed about the lack of transportation museum, we decided to take another look at the web page. It's basically a picture, and all the writing is embedded and written in Kanji, so we can't even throw it at an internet translator. It does however have a date on it, which is exactly one week ago, the day we arrived in Japan. Well synchronised ...

So instead we found the steam train engine museum in Kyoto. Not quite the same thing, but it did have a lot of steam engines, including one big one which was constantly driving up and down the same 1km piece of rail, pulling and pushing a couple of carriages.

And while Kyoto station isn't serviced by any steam powered trains anymore, its 15 story magnificance which still deserved a few more pictures.

But all this train talk can make you a little curious about the Shinkansen. The service has been around for 50 years, and has yet to experience a single passanger fatility. There are also roughly enough Shinkansen trains in service to take the entire population of Australia's capital, all comfortably seated. And all delivered to their destinations with an average delay of 36 seconds. But then there's still an entire train network which isn't made up of 300km/h trains. Shinjuku, a train station within Tokyo, services roughly 10 times the population of Australia's capital per day.

P.S.: ¥5 for the person to spot today's Washinoko.