Nagoya (名古屋)

Today's goal was to shoot down to Nagoya for the train museum there. It's a little weird that the museum from trains which were very much operated by Japanese Rail (JR), cannot actually be reached by a JR train (who operate most of the trains in Japan). But at least there still was a train.

The museum was proud to actually also have a magnetic levitation prototype in its collection, though I'm not too sure how proud I would have been of the dent on the front left magnet section cover. Compared to the remaining collection which looked like it had just been rolled of the factory floor, it stuck out a bit.

But they certainly had a model train set to be proud of. The thing was huge, and had an insane number of controls over the trains, down to being able to remotely control the inside lights of the trains. It even had a model legitimately levitating train in one corner. What I really didn't expect from a train museum though were the models cars which drove themselves around the cluttered model streets. It was only a few, but nevertheless impressive how they steered themselves around the other cars. My best guess was that the cars followed some wireless marker line mounted underneath the model. But however they did it, somebody had far too much fun designing and constructing the model.

Nagoya itself was fairly depressive, considering that it was raining steadily, and most of the other attractions had already closed by the time we ripped ourselves from the train museum. But it continued to provide the steady reassuring rumble of a city in action, even if the Shinkansen station did not really appear to have been in the very centre of the action.

The funniest sign we came across today would have been one for BicCamera. Fairly large and it had a 1.5 octaves of a keyboard illuminated underneath it. In a very slow rhythm, individual keys would blank out to what was presumably the store jingle.