Inside the room of the Twilight Express

[JR 500系]

For anyone that might be interested:

 

 

I am very interested, and so sad to see it retire....

[Jcarlton]

That is about the biggest and fanciest compartment that I have ever seen.

[spacecadet]

Wife and I tried very hard on about four years straight worth of visits to Japan to get tickets in one of these rooms... it's impossible. She has a Japanese credit card and address, so theoretically a person could call JR right when tickets go on sale and get one of these rooms.

 

But they were just constantly being bought up by travel agents first who then attach them to some ridiculously overpriced package deal, like $10,000 for the train trip and a couple of hotel nights in Sapporo. There's definitely some kind of scam going on; it's like how the best concert tickets in the US all seem to go to resellers even though nobody's supposed to get preferential treatment.

 

We ended up giving up on the Twilight Express completely and settling for a twin room on the Cassiopeia, and even that we had to get on Yahoo Auctions.

 

I'm just amazed with the demand there was for these trains that JR couldn't figure out some way to keep them running. I mean I don't know if that's even technically possible, but I understand they're still running freight on those same routes, so I feel like it must have been.

[Sacto1985]

I have this feeling that JR East and JR Hokkaido are quietly looking at reviving Cassiopeia, especially since they could build more EH800 locomotives to pull the Cassiopeia trainset between Aomori and Hakodate Stations and the fact the this trainset was only constructed (I believe) in the late 1990's.