Nagoya's Sunken Trams - Aichi News Documentary

[ED75-775]

Found while doing some quick research for my random trip photos thread, this documentary details efforts by Aichi News to find any remains of the eighty Nagoya City Transportation Bureau trams sunk off the Atsumi Peninsular to develop an artificial reef in 1974.

 

 

The team initially found a former rail and hanging strap on the seafloor - the latter of which was recovered - before finding on a later dive the remains of a tram body, rotted away above sill level but still identifiable as a tram. The documentary does come across as a little breathless and over-excitable at times, not that I can understand any of what's being said bar a few words here and there, but it's worth a watch in my opinion. 

 

Alastair

[kuro68000]

Wow, thanks, that's really interesting. But did it work as a reef?

[ED75-775]

@kuro68000 my suspicion is no. The fact that only parts of one remain, and even then what's left of the body is only up to sill level, would reinforce that.

 

Alastair

[kuro68000]

I hesitated to say it, but I wonder if it more a case of "we have 80 trams to dispose of, what can we do with them?" than an environmental effort. But then again I'd have thought that there would be some scrap value. Maybe nobody had the space to break up 80 trams.

[cteno4]

Been done a lot with trams and subway cars. NYC has dumped a lot of old subway cars off of NYC to try to create some artificial reefs. Problem with something like a subway car vs a steel ship is that subway cars are mostly pretty thin metal and even the superstructure is pretty lightweight and will rust away pretty quickly. I would expect little left of a japanese streetcar in 50 years [us one maybe more as we always have to build them to crash into walls]. Ships tend to be a lot beefier and bigger so even when they start to collapse they are still a big island to keep a reef going. 

 

Always a debate if this a good thing to do and there is the issue of not recycling all the metals in these. These days the big debate is over abandoned oil rigs. There are a huge number that are due for removal [thats usually part of the up front agreement that they be removed after they are retired]. The cost to remove them is really big and the artificial reefs solution is to just cut them off 50’ down and leave the rest standing. Debate is if pulling it all up will not only take away the “reef” currently there many animals are using now and into the future, but also disruption to the seabed communities pulling them out. But the structures will eventually fail and fall to the sea floor, but argument is they may continue to be islands on deeper sea floor. Chap i use to work with is a fish biologist who is a big supporter of leaving them in place. He sees great fish diversity with the platforms in Southern California and sees them as nice islands of biodiversity where overfishing and habitat destruction has taken out a lot of the biodiversity on the natural reefs in the area.

 

jeff

[Cat]

And don't underestimate the distance that Goji can toss a tram!

[ED75-775]

On 5/1/2025 at 1:27 AM, kuro68000 said:

I hesitated to say it, but I wonder if it more a case of "we have 80 trams to dispose of, what can we do with them?" than an environmental effort. But then again I'd have thought that there would be some scrap value. Maybe nobody had the space to break up 80 trams.

 

Actually, there's little to no scrap value in tram bodies. The real value is tied up in the copper and brass components which are always the first parts to be removed when a vehicle is scrapped. Once they're gone, the body really isn't worth much on its own, and even less so if the tram body is a 'semi-steel' one where parts of it are wooden and others are steel.

 

Alastair