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There is a clear acceptance in Japan that when commuting in a major cities (unless you pay the supplement to travel in the 'Green Car' or on the various 'Liner' or equivalent services) then if you travel at peak time, the experience will be horrible. So folks are informed. And there is no...

I was thinking about the very different approach to level crossings in Tokyo. While there is a programme to try to get rid of them, it is normally by elevating the line or putting the line in a tunnel. It is very rare for them to be closed. What is striking is that there are thousands of them...

While your main point is correct - that Japanese private railways were generally constructed with real estate in mind, the history here is a bit garbled. The line that is now the Seibu Ikebukuro line predates the massive department store in Ikebukuro. Both were renamed later to Seibu, which is...

I have seen many tunnels linking stations around the world. Apart from where they are trivially short, they only work where either there is large natural footfall between the 2 stations across all periods of the day, or there is sufficient demand for the tunnels to incorporate access to...

Could you do a Bedford to Leeds service which acts as a stopping service until Derby, and then express from there?

I realise that this is a controversial point, but on some of the lighter used JR lines in Japan, they operate on a 'One-man' (a direct transliteration from the Japanese phrase) basis. This means that there is no guard on the train - which is relatively unusual. But more importantly, in most...

Liquidation is a process that results in the company disappearing - and companies in liquidation cannot trade, apart from liquidating their assets for the benefit of creditors. Administration is a temporary process where there is the possibility of the company surviving, but external parties...

I have to confess to not particularly liking tea or coffee. But I am struck by the fact that in Japan, there is a huge market (and lots of variety) for canned and bottled teas and coffees, which are served hot or cold from vending machines. Are these so much worse than freshly ground coffee that...

I used to live in Kamakura in Japan. The JR Yokosuka line trains (which north of there, toward Tokyo, would be 15 carriages), would split just south of there at Zushi, with 4 carriages at the south end of the train sent going into a siding south of the station, with the main 11 carriages (which...

It's not necessarily the best system, but maybe useful to think about how it works in Japan. For most trains with reservations there are some carriages that are entirely with reserved seats and then (a smaller number of carriages) that are completely unreserved. The reserved carriages are priced...

In some threads there has been speculation about how long the GWR sleeper sets will last. And I'm struck that the only remaining regular sleeper sets in Japan (the 285 series EMU) are entering the final phase of their working life. Given that the loading gauge for JR and the UK is similar...

True. But there is a massive difference between able to identify a single roman/latin letter or arabic number framed within inside a distinctive logo (for example a B in a circle) than trying to remember / pronounce / spell an unfamiliar word like 'Bakerloo' which maybe located in English text...

I am all for numbering the lines in London - and I can see an argument for something similar in other cities in the UK with extensive interconnected systems (and I think I have said the same thing on quite a number of threads!) I travel to many cities around the world, for both pleasure and...

Japan has lots of trains built in the 90's

I have never seen high speed tickets (which both of your examples are) available more than 30 days in advance.

Most frequent intercity bus routes in Japan are joint operations between the two companies with bases at the 2 ends of the route, with each company providing the first buses from their home areas.

Not intending this to sound like a loaded question: how hard/expensive would it be to replace 2+3 seating with reasonably comfortable 2+2 seating?

Once electrification is further advanced, all-stations trains on the MML on the route to Leicester and further North, allowing (timetable permitting) longer distance trains to be sped up?

Travelling a lot in Japan, I have come to appreciate the Japanese approach on long distance trains where a large number of carriages (and on some routes, or at peak times, all carriages) are reservation compulsory. (The counter-example being off-peak Kodama services where demand is much lower...

At the moment, but do we know there are not plans for that space?