Search the Community

Hi Friends, I know that @Tony Galiani was waiting for this report ... So that, let's begin this (very) long serie of posts, depicting my travel to the Rising Sun Country. As it's somewhere my 10th or 11th travel ... I'm familiar with Japan. As I've announced it a couple of weeks ago ... ... I was in Japan for a mix of leisure and work, landing on september 10th, 2023 at Tokyo Narita airport, rsp 17:35 JST (time is important ...). Landing doesn't mean disembarquing (at 17:45 JST). As usual NRT is really convenient and fast and despite I've got a checked luggage to collect, I'm around 18:10 in front of the Skyliner desk, queuing, absolutely not stressed. Guess what ? you're in Japan ... people are efficient ! (to be fair, I was flying First Class with Emirates, and you're given a 'Fast lane' card. Anyway, even without 'fast lane' it's really fast at NRT) Why not the N'EX ? First of all the N'EX is slower and less comfortable (to me) but .... look at the waiting line full of tourist exchanging their JR Pass voucher It's 18:13 when I've got my Skyliner ticket ... and the train leaves at 18:16 meaning in less that 3 minutes. Welcome in Japan, no stress two minutes after you're on the platform, boarding the Skyliner (reason why I didn't made an orgy of photos ...) (this shot below is from a former travel in 2016, just to show you how it looks like ... at that time there were no fences and sliding doors) It's really a comfortable place to travel (to answer a question below, yes N'EX has free Wifi as Shinkansen and other JR limited Express). Anyway, I do not need it as I've purchased an 'unlimited' Data Card for 29 euros in France ... very easy to use, and cheap too) and if you need to plug your laptop of cellphone charger, everything is there (sorry for the poor quality) Commuting in Nippori (instead of Ueno... it was raining) a looooong corridor to the JY Yamanote line direction Shimbashi, my favorite place to stay in Tokyo

I'm curious if anyone has added DCC sound decoder to their Kato Shinkansen, specifically the E7 or N700A. I saw a thread on here from back in 2015 that started addressing this but it seemed to end very anticlimactically due to limitations at the time. It seems like the non-motored trailer cars for the N700A have a cavern under the floor piece with a metal weight. Since the metal strips already run through here it seems like an easy place to stash a sound decoder with a sugar cube speaker. I assume a decoder and speaker will come close to weight to the metal already there. I think the biggest question here though, has anyone ever generated sound files for any of the Shinkansen?

http://ajw.asahi.com/article/behind_news/social_affairs/AJ201409180073 *not mentioned here, but mentioned in the original Japanese print article, the actual main purpose of the speed-up is not to reduce the total travel time (though that is the general public advertising point) , but rather to facilitate faster timetable recovery in instances of accidents, bad weather, etc. Back in JNR days, the average delay in shinkansen services (in one year) typically ranged over two minutes, while this past decade, this has been reduced to under a minute- in the case of 2003, six seconds. However, last year, the average delay figure rose to 54 seconds. Presumably this technical development will help get that number back down again.