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Fujisawa (population of more than 400,000), while having a huge industrial base, and some rather lovely coastline, has the Shinkansen passing through it but no station.

Or if you want a view, how about this . Underneath, it is a Hitachi AT100 (like the class 385).

Yes, there would be an anomaly where if a person got on a train, went around a massive loop and then got off at a very local station, they would end up paying a relatively small fare. But how often is that likely to happen, in practice? I think that if it were a significant issue...

I think I explained my point badly. Rather than 'no break of journey allowed' I mean that 'break of journey becomes meaningless'. Because 1) the cost of the journey with 2 tickets would not be more than for a single ticket the whole way, and 2) tickets wouldn't have to be bought in advance...

How about a standard price per km, with some routes have a straight discount (to encourage use) applied in a transparent way? And additional discount fares available for specific trains of low use. And then apart from that, no travelcards, no discount for return fares, no break of journey...

The key to get the best deal is to go for anonymous. Queensbury is only a few minutes further out than Wembley Park, and is a lot cheaper.

Even if each processing of an individual takes roughly the same for manual checking and e-gates once you get to the front of the queue, if you are able to have more gates (and cost is going to be a factor), then overall it is going to be much quicker - because the queue will go a lot faster. In...

Recently, the Keisei railway company in Tokyo has installed CCTV on their older trains with clever-looking modules that replace a standard size florescent bulb with a camera module and a shorter LED bulb. I don't know how the data is stored, but it looked like a simple way of introducing CCTV on...

When I first travelled on the Tokaido / Sanyo Shinkansen, the trains were a mixture of 100, 300 and 500 series. The 500 series felt and looked amazing. As well as the introduction of the duck bill (as mentioned by @yoyothehobo), there was a positive decision to try to get the 16 car fleet as...

I have to admit that I thought of the sandwich idea because of the blanked off end - and the realisation that, unless a corridor connection were to be put into the blanked end then the loco could just as well be in the middle as at one end. The advantage I can see would be the ability to run...

Could you sandwich a class 68 in the middle of 2 Mark 5 sets (at the point where there is currently no corridor connection) - both in terms of power and control systems?

The only remaining conventional (as opposed to super-premium) sleepers in Japan are EMUs, which run as a pair and split on the route. There's only one route with 2 branches left.

On trains in Japan where the driver does ticketing duties (many of the most rural routes), passengers can normally get on on multiple doors, but are required to get off by the door next to the driver's cab. When getting on the train, the passenger picks up a ticket that shows what station they...

This discussion is giving me flashbacks to a job a did a number of years ago, when I worked in the 'tricky problems' department of one the UK's largest (if not the largest) user of cheques. The banking industry was proposing a clear programme for the phase-out of cheques, and because of our...

Somewhat ironically, the smaller windows on most Shinkansen trains is not a major downside, because they allign perfectly to every seat. Even the rotation of the seat (to ensure they are always facing forward, unless the passengers actively choose otherwise) is around the same axis of symmetry...

At Attenborough, I wonder whether they might replace the level crossing altogether with a bridge somewhere further up the line, in either direction (while retaining a footbridge only at the station). There seems to be space at the Barton Lane level crossing, there is currently a footpath from...

In Tokyo: JR Shinagawa - some platforms for terminating, but as far as I remember few (or none) of them are bays. At lot of terminating trains are from the opposite direction to what I think @TT-ONR-NRN is thinking. Through trains continue on both the surface and in tunnels. Keikyu Shinagawa JR...

Quite a brave assertion. Time is a relative construct. In lots of cases it is defined in the way that is of most use.

In urban and suburban Japan, local buses are often run by the private railway company that is dominant in the area, and routes tend to centre on the railway stations (both the private ones and the JR ones). There is a strong assumption that people take the bus to get to the station, and carry on...

'Gateway to ...' is a metaphor / cliché. The sort of thing that was often used in the past as a marketing tool. I can kind of see why you could describe Crewe as a gateway to the Northwest - as long as you assume travel from London (by train). But it doesn't mean that there is any benefit in...