Hello from Washington...

[Reforger83]

Greetings from Washington State, my name is Mark. In 2001 I made the trip to Japan. It was Winter and I was staying with friends in Minikami. As a railfan, I fell in love quickly with the trains of Japan as I caught a steam train running through the little town. I took many pictures, and visited Takasaki and Maebashi, riding a few of the locals and taking the Shinkansen into Tokyo. I managed to stop in at a hobby shop in the Ginza district and bought an N scale EF-65. I only wish I knew where it was now. I couldn't believe how friendly everyone was in the shop and how welcome I felt.

 

I've been so busy with trains here in the states, my interest in Japan waned a bit. There just isn't much here to stoke the fires. Books describing all of the classes of trains, how their rail system operates, literature in English... the lack of these things makes it hard to gain any traction on Japan rail enthusiasm.

 

In 2001 it was difficult at best to find anyone interested in talking Japanese trains, let alone finding web pages devoted to this side of the hobby. Even the model side has its challenges.

 

Last week I was fiddling with you tube and decided to look up some JR Trains. My love flooded back, and I decided to poke around and see if the hobby of loving Japanese trains had changed. Indeed it has. More web resources, Amazon has its share of books and Maps, and this web site came up. People in Japan willing to explain some things to me? Folks actually discussing why JR is so cool? Heck, I can even buy that EF-65 now on-line, and Amazon might even have it.

 

No, this is all good. I'm happy to be back.

[miyakoji]

Hi Reforger, welcome to the forum.  We have several members in Japan, both Japanese and expats, and the rest of us are all over the world.  Yes you can buy an EF65 on major ecommerce sites, you can also get them through modeltrainplus.net and loco1hobby.net, the owners are members on this board (nartak and keitaro, respectively).  You can also find plenty of discussion of models and prototypes, and youtube vids of both models and prototypes are posted throughout the forum.  Enjoy!

[cteno4]

Welcome reforger!

 

I think you will find a lot here to keep your boilers stoked! It's a friendly worldwide group that enjoys both the prototypes and models!

 

You will find options to buy stuff from Japan as miyakoji said, usually at better prices than Amazon and the personal service is excellent! Some even offer personal shopping service for those hard to impossible to find exported stuff as well.

 

YouTube is full of great Japanese train videos, you can probably spend 24/7 riding Japanese trains on YouTube.

 

Jeff

[Sascha]

Hallo reforger. welcome to the forum!!

[Melandir]

Welcome onboard Reforger