Need Exercise? Here's the railway for you.

[bill937ca]

 

 

 

Pushing a hand-car runs at Cosmos Garden in Ōsaki City, Miyagi Prefecture.

[katoftw]

Looks like hard work.

 

The track looks fairly recently laid or repaired.  Are they awaiting funds for a engine?

Edited October 20, 2016 by katoftw

[bill937ca]

I believe this was a historical model of railway operation in Japan. Before WWII this was a much more feudal society than Western countries.

[Sacto1985]

Here's a third video from that tourist line. Note the full passenger load.

 

[Kabutoni]

It's also maybe nice to note that the usage of the wheel in Japan until the ending of the 'closed country' sakkoku era (Edo) was very limited: http://www.alanmacfarlane.com/savage/A-WHEEL.PDF Working animals were pretty scarse and expensive to operate, plus using raw human labour was abundant and traditional during that time, so it was a natural and obvious method of propulsion for these primitive railways. Later, horse drawn coaches were introduced, as well as simple steam locomotives (commonly called hettsui-type), like the ones that can be found in front of Atami station (JR East, Tōkaidō line):

 

Source: http://yoyotoru.photo-web.cc/msl_0210.html

[Jcarlton]

Here's some more.

Edited October 22, 2016 by cteno4
Fixes YouTube embeds

[marknewton]

Looks like hard work.

 

The track looks fairly recently laid or repaired.  Are they awaiting funds for a engine?

We've had a thread about these handcar lines before. They were known as jinsha kido, they were fairly common once.

 

https://ja.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/人車軌道

 

All the best,

 

Mark.

[bikkuri bahn]

The cobblers/sandal makers must have been working overtime fixing the footwear of the pusher guys.  Though I doubt the actual roadbed way back when was as nice as these reproductions (prob. mostly hard packed earth)

[kvp]

The wikipedia page Mark linked has two old photos. The roadbed was the same that was used on many contemporary horse railways, namely packed earth. This allows human pushers and (if available) draft animals to pull the cars. The reproduction is lacking this, proably to cut down on sleeper maintenance as packed earth is not optimal for rainwater drainage and could lead to shortened sleeper life.

[Nick_Burman]

If anyone here has Dan Free's "Early Japanese Railways" book, there is a delightful transcription of a description of a trip on the Atami Keiben (Atami - Odawara, at the time still human-powered) by a contempary foreign visitor (British or American). Despite the primitiveness of human traction, it seems that the line was very much a professional job.

 

Cheers NB

[Nick_Burman]

The reproduction is lacking this, proably to cut down on sleeper maintenance as packed earth is not optimal for rainwater drainage and could lead to shortened sleeper life.

 

Not quite. Here in Brazil we had a lot of mainline trackage which was earth-ballasted. Packed and tamped properly it actually helped preserve the sleeper. However in summer it also led to trains which raised clouds of dust as they moved. Much of this ended up on passenger's clothes (thus the practive of wearing an overcoat over one's clothes when travelling by train) but more importantly much of it found its way onto the rolling stock and locomotives, causing premature wear. Eventually those railways which could ballasted their lines with rock ballast, but there were parts of the RFFSA (Federal Railway system) which remained with tamped earth right into the 1990's, especially in NE Brazil.

 

Cheers NB

[westfalen]

Just when I thought I'd ridden every passenger carrying railway on Shikoku.