Route of the Tomiiden - line and a not-so-potted history

[Nick_Burman]

With Tomix putting out a map of the Tomiiden and the collective brains of the forum helping me decipher it, things have been moving on my version of the railway. With the map in hand, I have been working on a preliminary distance chart/timetable. So far I have worked out (read eyeballed) the following distances:

 

Minato Line: Soda-mae to Dentetsu-Machinaka, 6km;

Main Line: Dentetsu-Machinaka - Omori-shako - Kitamura - Kimura Onsen, 33km;

Inuyama Line: Omori-Shako - Inuyama - Akasaka, 16km;

Yakushi Line: Kitamura - Yakushi, 2km.

 

I don't have dates yet, but my storyline for the railway starts with the Unabara Tetsudo* building a 762mm gauge line from Unabara (later renamed Soda-mae) to Machinaka. The then IGR hadn't yet come to town and the railway was built to give Machinaka a connection to coastal shipping. The new line was a success but the financial exertions of building the line left its promoters without capital for further extensions. Not only that but the management (composed mainly of wealthy Machinaka merchants) developed a "funnel mentality" - why bother to extend further on if all traffic between Unabara and the hinterland behind Machinaka would have to obligatorily come down their rails if it did not want to face a long, slow haul down the poor roads and tracks of the day... Why, they might just as well stop over on their way and spend money at our establishments! This left villagers and landowners on the plains located to the east and north of Machinaka anguished, if not downright fuming with anger. Making use of recent legislation passed by the imperial government to foment the development of local railways, a group of local grandees and commoners pooled their resources and formed the Tomii Keiben (Tomii Light Railway). With the commercial help of Herr Otto Reimer of Tokyo, tracks were quickly pushed across the nine and one-half kilometers of rice paddies separating Machinaka from Tomii; the arrival of the first “okajoki” in the village was celebrated with fireworks, festivities and the obligatory blessing of the local Shinto priest. The 10km-long Inuyama branch followed suit a few weeks later. Traffic developed also very satisfactorily on the new railway, even though Tomii and Unabara managements did not see exactly eye-to-eye – the Unabara people thought the Tomii gang a bunch of parvenus while the Tomii management resented the way with which the Unabara gang thought that access to the port was a god-given monopoly. An attempt by the Tomii Keiben to build its own line (on a different routing) down to Unabara was rejected with a loud NO from both central and prefectural governments. Although both companies were at times at logger heads with each other, schedules on both railways were coordinated however each company had its own station (set right next door to each other, only a short fence separating the two properties) and passengers travelling between Tomii or Inuyama and the port had to change trains at Machinaka. Even freight had to be transhipped as neither company trusted the other to return its wagons on time...

 

Matters would have stayed like that had not a new player reared up its head in the horizon: the Imperial Japanese Government Railways was bringing its 1067mm gauge mainline down the coast! Change was on its way...both the Tomii and Unabara railways were reaching the limit of their capacity as 762mm gauge lines and between one petty squabble and another both companies muttered joint ideas of gauge widening. The news that the IGR was coming their way spurred both companies into investigating the idea with more intent. In the meantime, a silent change was happening at boardroom level as a group of Kyoto investors of the public-utility-interurban-electric-railway-and-department-store kind slowly and smoothly edged their way into the management of both railways. With them came another, even more revolutionary proposal...that the new trains would be run using that newfangled source of motive power, electricity... When the local newspaper broached the idea to the public there was elation – wow, Machinaka is going to be just as modern as Tokyo or Kyoto! In the meantime the new shareholders proceeded to bury the hatchet between the two companies - a connecting track was laid between the two stations and freight began running to the port directly. Passengers were a different story as several owners of inns and shops surrounding the stations complained that they would loose custom if trains of one company were to run straight. As many of them owned shares, the companies acquiesced.... This didn't last long, though - one afternoon the bailiff arrived at the Unabara Tetsudo HQ bearing a writ of condemnation - the IGR needed the land where the Machinaka terminal stood for its own station. In view of this the Kyoto investors proceeded to move with double-quick tempo, consolidating both roads in record time as the Tomii Tetsudo. Gauge conversion started immediately; the Unabara line was realigned into the former Tomii station, which became a reversing terminal. The original Unabara terminal was then razed to the ground. Even before IGR had even finished building its “wide gauge” station, Tomii trains were already running on wider tracks, albeit powered by second-hand steam locomotives. Electrification had to wait a bit longer...

 

*= a nod to Studio Ghibli... :-D

 

(more to come)

 

 

Cheers NB

 

Edited August 6, 2016 by Nick_Burman