Abandoned depot in Yuasa with a mystery

[yakumo381]

Went to Yuasa during my recent Japan trip and photographed this abandoned depot by the station. It looked to have possibly once been a freight terminal from pre-container JNR (as has several lines and sidings leading to it) but more recently to have been a permanent way depot.

 

Would make a great feature for a corner of a layout especially with the surrounding greenery invading it.

 

The mystery are the two rail sections mounted on plinths - what would they have been used for?

 

My immediate thought was for gauging wheels on an axle but how would you get it up to them?

 

Could it be a "standard" against which gauge checking tools were themselves checked?

 

It looks like there was once a notice set between them or possibly a board for chalking information on?

 

Can anyone who does / did work in permanent way shed any light on this mystery?

[miyakoji]

Cool find.  I thought maps might have the building labelled, so I could search on something, but no such luck.  Here's the aerial view: https://www.google.com/maps/@34.0326042,135.1807479,116m/data=!3m1!1e3 .  What could it be...

[katoftw]

Was the area known for fresh produce of some kind a few decades ago?  It has a farmers co-op or private owner look about it.  Small little shunter would've lived in the shed in the shade, and 1 or 2 Wamus would have been loaded my manpower on the siding, then the shunter would bring it out onto the mainline for collection by a through train.

Edited June 28, 2015 by katoftw

[bikkuri bahn]

Yuasa is known as a center for soy sauce production, so the facility may have handled products related to that.  Also, up the line at Fujinami was the interchange with the Arita Railway, which once hauled mikan oranges as well as the fertilizer used by growers.　Freight service probably ended in the first half of the 1980's with the runup to privitisation.

[Sacto1985]

Yuasa is known as a center for soy sauce production, so the facility may have handled products related to that.  Also, up the line at Fujinami was the interchange with the Arita Railway, which once hauled mikan oranges as well as the fertilizer used by growers.　Freight service probably ended in the first half of the 1980's with the runup to privitisation.

 

If the Google translation of the original Japanese Wikipedia article is correct, the town of Yuasa is the center of shoyu production and a major transshipment point for mikan oranges grown nearby. That explains the abandoned freight terminal building that was probably quite busy during the mikan harvest season.

[yakumo381]

Thanks for the feed back. The Soy sauce aspect links in well with the artifact on Yuasa station platform (see photo attached).

 

However this still leaves open what the two sections of rail were there to do?

[kvp]

It could be as simple as a display stand for an old wheelset. Actually i've seen something similar displayed in a museum. It was a short piece of track with a wheelset mounted on it and one of the wheels was cracked. They had a small hammer with a long handle mounted next to it on a piece of chain, so you could test and hear the difference between a good and a bad wheel. In the past (before ultrasound wheel checks) it was common to see workers at each terminal station checking the wheels of the trains with hammers and replacing worn down brake pads. Of course it's just a wild guess. So if it had a wheelset on it, it could be purely decorative as the plinthed steam locomotive you can see on a few old pictures or it could be used for something else.

[westfalen]

I'd go with the display theory too, there seems to be the remains of what may have been a flower bed between the two posts and I'm also wondering if the blank spot on the wall behind may have been the location of a plaque or sign.  The Japanese love this sort of thing.