Odakyu Romance Car

[Guest bill937ca]

[kashirigi]

My wife and I actually took the Romance Car to Hakone. A less romantic trip couldn't be imagined, as the guy beside us took off his shoes and socks and picked at his feet.

 

The windows of the train were filthy, and we were seated in such a way that we could barely see out. The passenger cars could have used a little maintenance.

 

We took the Shinkansen back, and it only took 45 min.

 

All in all, it was much less than I had hoped for.

[Bernard]

Kashirigi---Say it ain't so!

I take the Long Island RR & the NYC subway everyday to work, now that is dirty. Every time I see a photo of a Japanese train they're usually very clean and I rarely see any weathering on them. One of my favorite trains is the Romance 50000. How was the Shinkansen?

[kashirigi]

Every other train I took in Japan was sparkling clean with excellent service and arrived at its destination within 10 seconds of its scheduled time, assuming it didn't hit it right on the mark.

 

Travel by Shinkansen is great, except that it's so smooth it doesn't really feel like a traditional train. Another minor drawback is that there's often a fairly high fence around the track so that people don't accidentally get hit at 250km/h, so visibility of the scenery is sometimes reduced. There's also not much time to look at things when you're speeding past them at aircraft speed. Just look at things a little closer to the horizon.

 

There's two versions of the Romance Car -- the newer one looks very sleek indeed. The original (the one in MSTS which we took) is just a little the worse for wear (although still at least an order of magnitude above VIA rail). It was the foot picking that put us off. Had we shown up a little earlier, we probably would have gotten a better seat. The train was kind of dirty by Japanese standards, by which I mean sparkling by any other standard. Just not like JR.

 

Also, as we had already purchased JR rail passes, travel by Shinkansen was essentially free, rather than paying to take the Romance Car.

 

There was a good side to all of this, though. While waiting for the Shinkansen I found an N-gauge book which I have found extraordinarily useful, and it was that which finally drove me to purchase my first model railroad products.

[C62]

Excellent video!