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The best hotel breakfast I’ve had in Japan was the Hilton Odaiba. I wouldn’t pay extra myself but we got rooms through points and we had to use up a set amount of points and so adding the breakfast in got us closer to using the maximum points available that otherwise would have expired. These were use them or lose them points through a Wyndham program and unused points expire after a year or two and we had excess built up. But the Hilton breakfast was wonderful. I don’t remember where but we’ve had some pretty good breakfasts at Japanese hotels and some pretty bad ones (or at least small and boring). We don’t usually get the breakfast but when it’s only ¥1000 or ¥1200 per person we opt for it to save the hassle of having to go looking.

Thanks YouTube video

Best way to share video is a You Tube video.

Day 19 Today we return to complete the Iida line from the other end. But first up we travel the other two lines on the triangle between Shiojiri, Okaya and Tatsuno. I didn’t notice at the time but this gacha vending machine has models of public telephones, including the one I found at Owani, a week or so prior. Change at Shiojiri to a local train for Tatsuno, lots of support for Shiojiri as a wine city here. At Tatsuno we just need to cross the platform for a train to Okaya. Okaya is pretty busy with school traffic. After a brief look around outside it’s back to platform 0 for our train. Which we take one station to Kawagishi. I’m not sure what the Silky Post gets you. We pick up a following train here, at Tatsuno we see the border between JR East and JR Central made clear on the sign. Near Inakita station we spot this. At Iijima we cross another train, it looks strange, the car near me reads キサヤ 94-2 and it has yellow ends. I think it’s some sort of narrow gauge Doctor Yellow. No sooner have we come to a halt than it departs heading the opposite direction. We reach our train’s destination of Iida, because of the one station gap from here to Kiriishi we are not willing to jump on a train north to track down the train containing the Kisaya we saw at Iijima. Iida has a linear themed waiting booth on the platform, it took me this prompt to look up and understand that Iida is on the planned route. Should be a little bit faster to get to once that opens. We now head south and disembark at Kawaji, chosen primarily because it has easy access to a conbini to purchase some lunch. His do you like them apples? Heading north again we find our old friend at Ina-Oshima and bail out of the train, not fast enough though as it’s already bolted. Chasing it down and making it back to Matsumoto at a reasonable hour are mutually exclusive though. This old hire car booth in the forecourt takes our eye. We may as well head south for a bit though, so we check out Shimodaira and Komagane before heading back to Matsumoto. All seems fine train wise tonight so we take the opportunity to get off at Hirata and visit HARD OFF Matsumoto Hirata. New track: 97.7km

More progress here. I only have two power packs so I connected one to the outer loop and one to the unitram system I'm still waiting on a V3 and V5 Kato set and it will be complete How do you share video on this forum? I think clicking here will make you download it (it's a small one but still) Video

The fact the item number is not shown anymore at the metalevel is actually an issue to figure out which addon one needs 😅

That's interesting! My 16-car N700S (Kato) has only one motor car. It works fine. But now you got me thinking maybe convert one other 16 to a motor car to have more power. I run it on train show layouts. They are not exactly the epitome of perfection. 🙂

Thanks for posting @UnfinishedKit! Great find! My plan is to rent a bike and tour around Tsuwano for the three hours. Save the sake for the return leg.

My friend who owns the hotel I normally stay at has started using better pillows after I explained to him that foreigners usually prefer them. He keeps one I bought many many years ago from Donki for my knees too. The main issue I have is sitting on the futon or floor. It's just not comfortable for me. As a bed the futon is okay. About the translation thing, Google Translate has a conversation mode that is supposed to just pick up who is speaking automatically. I have not tried it though. That said, you only need to learn a few phrases to cover 90% of what is said when checking into a hotel, so it might be worth a try.

Yeah in my experience the business hotels have hard beds and thin and somewhat hard pillows. In general. I think they’re trying to recreate the futon on the floor experience in a bed.

Interestingly and to bring this back to model RR, when I was at RG Rokko in Kobe looking at stuff they had such a device as well. It was pretty cool.

Swapped it with the E353 chassis, so the three car unit is also powered (and i don't feel like having only one powered car in a 12 car train either)

Thanks and bookmarked!!! When I tried back in the summer of last year their website was Japanese only, or I was incompetent and couldn't find the "English" button. But this looks beautiful and very functional. This will make is much easier next time visiting Japan. BTW, I think the fee to join the Club is either ¥1200 or ¥1500 if I remembered correctly. It was plastered on every elevator when we were there in Oct/Nov. I think it's a one time fee and not yearly but I could be wrong. I was about to say the same. I definitely know Hilton does not and since what Hilton does Mariott does also (and vice versa), I'm going to guess that Marriott doesn't either. If you are die hard point earner, it can add up if it's a long trip.

Just curious what you are planning to do with the powered chassis?

I'm starting in railway modeling, still researching and playing with layout planning(Scarm+XtrCad)...was so absorted with Unitrack that i don't even know that Tomix has this kind os sets...

The staff at the Toyoko Inn at Shin-Amori did not have much English but they used a small hand held device for translation. The desk clerk would speak into it then hold it out for me to see the screen which had the words translated into English. It was a really neat device but that was the only time I saw one in use in Japan (or elsewhere for that matter). I used a translation app on my phone to "converse" with someone on the boat to Naoshima. It was a bit cumbersome as it involved typing the text in and then holding for the other person to read but it worked and it was a neat interaction. Ciao, Tony

Some start of the year purchases Kato E353: Powered chassis: JR381: JR 485: Two extra cars for the 485: Series 14 sleepercoaches for behind the EF66: Small line up:

Having used a few business hotels then yes, they are generally fine. They mostly stick to the same formula. Western style room with a bed, bathroom with toilet and bath/shower. Free coffee is fairly standard. Basic but clean and functional. Wifi is usually fine but it can be worth bringing an ethernet adapter for your laptop as they often have a cable too. The beds and especially the pillows can be really hit and miss. Sometimes fine, but often not very comfortable. The pillows are usually very thin in my experience. I haven't Toyoko Inn though so can't say if they fit the pattern. You may also not be as sensitive to comfort as me anyway.

It may well depend on your local laws. In Europe it is usually better to book direct with airlines, because you have more rights if things go wrong like cancellations. If you book with Expedia then they are a middle man and it complicates things. There are also rules about booking flights and hotels together as a package, but I don't really know much about them as I don't ever do that.

Thanks Tony, but honestly I had intended to go much further if I hadn't got that virus and if Niigata hadn't been snowed under. I really wanted to visit Doai too, and nearly did but just missed the opportunity due to the weather on the day. So colour wise I do a different one for each year. This year was yellow, last was orange, and green before that. The blue ones are stores I know about but which have not been visited yet. The symbols were my attempt to rate the stores, but I've largely given up on it now. While some are much bigger than others, what they have is so random that any rating becomes invalid from year to year. Sometimes the starred ones disappoint, sometimes the ones I think are small and unlikely to have much turn out to have some treasure. I think in the future I'll add more text notes, and only use the cross icon for ones that I visited but which have now closed permanently.

Here is a box of four C64 gondolas that were castings from a polystyrene master that I made some years before it was possible to buy ready to run gondolas from China. Also a polystyrene master for P62 box cars .

I fear it will fall on deaf ears, but we can hope. Clients after sinking a lot of time and money on a revamp of a site are usually unwilling to do much of any modification to the new site. Once deployed, other than technical issues, the site redesign contract is usually over, design changes at that point becomes new work or change of work orders and expensive. I’ve had clients berate the folks complaints as old farts and not seeing ahead to me. It was sad and a lot of what I was raising my had about in design loops, but there is such a desire to follow rather than look at what you need and what is best for your org, not the other lemming they were trying to follow. Mobile also is such a bright shiny object that tends to blind. It really wore me down fast and I had worked on huge, complex projects with ease compared to these. Trending and high volume tends to rule even if you have a huge data set that the small volume greatly exceeds the big volume stuff. I don’t get it. The culture is now just put in a few words and expect to be given what you want. While that works for some things I think most of us have learned in our hobby here it takes a bit more detailed research as you get into it that some good navigation and more narrowed searches help. A lot of the learning is in your research process and that is lost with just doing blind searches. The old HS site was very easy to navigate and do research on easily and quickly. Not now. jeff

Yes. I still hope we can give them some constructive feedback so they can implement changes.

Yes I think they just plugged the data fields into a set template. It was not designed to be the nice dense block of data previously presented at the top of the page, all together in a very tight format. Everything is a pre done template these days and pour your data into it and not much care how well it fits. again why I left the biz as no one seemed to care much about this sort of detail, it was make it look like this site mostly. In this case probably plaza. No thought about their data and presence and history. Follow the lemming… jeff

That with the bags is probably just an issue of matching the actual policy with Exoedias disclaiming text. I've never had an airline have different bag policies depending on where I bought it (ticketed on that airline -- not codeshare). I did have the issue with a AA codeshare flight on a JAL plane. Despite it being a JAP plane we had to abide by AA baggage policies. Most of the websites like Expedia and stuff just link you to the airlines baggage policies pages anyway. They may say some stuff on the itinerary but when you click a details link that will take you to a page that jumps to each airlines baggage policy so don't worry. If you buy a real JAL ticket on Expedia (not a codeshare from AA or Air Canada or something that is on a JAL plane) you'll get the same baggage allowance as buying directly from JAL *FOR THE SAME TICKET CLASS*. Some airlines have basic fares that don't have luggage included so make sure you're comparing apples to apples.