Tobu Nikko tram

[Nick_Burman]

http://6.fan-site.net/~haasan55/TobuNikkoYonesan.htm

 

Scenes from the Tobu Nikko tramway. Scroll down for the "ballet dance" between two trolley cars and an electric locomotive - the locomotive looks like the hippo from "Fantasia" next to the trolleys! Sadly the tramway closed in the 60's. Today the citizens of Nikko must be cursing Tobu's Board of Directors until kingdom come, as according to one tourist guidebook on some weekends Tobu's buses can take up to two hours to get to Lake Chuzenji and the Kegon Falls!!! how they must miss their trams...

 

 

Cheers

Edited June 25, 2013 by Nick_Burman

[ToniBabelony]

Thanks for sharing!

 

I never knew there also were freight trains on this line. This puts a whole new perspective on the Tōbu Nikko Tram! This could be a perfect example for a small model train layout. Mountains, street running, trams, freight, beautiful scenery. The lot.

 

Also yes, I think the trams would have made a big difference today traffic-wise. The streets are pretty much clogged outside the tourist season (when isn't it tourist season in Nikkō anyway?) and a tram with priority would have made getting around a lot easier.

[westfalen]

This is one of the lines I've looked at in my railway atlas that shows all the abandoned lines and wondered what it was like.

[miyakoji]

Some Tobu 100 trams became the Okaden 3000 series in Okayama:

 

http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E6%9D%B1%E6%AD%A6100%E5%BD%A2%E9%9B%BB%E8%BB%8A_%28%E8%BB%8C%E9%81%93%29

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Okayama_tram_3005_20070505.jpg

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Okayama_tram_3007_20070505.jpg

 

They retired car 3010 a few months ago:

 

uploaded by broadcasting1231:

 

uploaded by nek0mask55:

[bikkuri bahn]

Those ED610 type electric locomotives look like slighly smaller cousins to the Sagami Railway ED10 types*.  Both types were built by Toyo Kouki/Toyo Denki. 

 

Unmotored HO scale models of which are still (as of last month) on sale at selected Sotetsu service centers.

[Nick_Burman]

Thanks for sharing!

 

I never knew there also were freight trains on this line. This puts a whole new perspective on the Tōbu Nikko Tram! This could be a perfect example for a small model train layout. Mountains, street running, trams, freight, beautiful scenery. The lot.

 

Also yes, I think the trams would have made a big difference today traffic-wise. The streets are pretty much clogged outside the tourist season (when isn't it tourist season in Nikkō anyway?) and a tram with priority would have made getting around a lot easier.

 

Toni, the Nikko tramway served the Furukawa copper smelter (still there, but not smelting copper any longer), once one of the largest in Japan. It was the successor of an animal-powered (bullocks!) 610mm gauge line which (according to Dan Free) once went all the way across the mountains to Ashio (once Japan´s largest copper mine). How on earth it made it's way up across the mountains is a mystery to me - I'm with Google Earth open right now and the ascent from Umaegashi up to the lake is tremendous - the road is full of hairpin curves. Let alone the run across the divide to Ashio. Grades must have been quite ferocious. Anyway, between 1910 and 1913 the part between Umaegashi and Nikko was replaced by an ordinary tramway, running much on the same alignment - there is a picture on the book which matches quite well a scene on the page, of a bullock "train" crossing a bridge right by the arched bridge which is one of Nikko's symbols. Copper from Furukawa was hauled by little "cab on a raft" trams (one of which can be seen decked out as a snowplough in the page) pulling trailers, then transshipped manually into mainline wagons at Nikko. This lasted until WWII, when the necessity of getting as much copper out as possible made the transshipment a nuisance and so a direct connection was made to the Tobu system (which had purchased the tramway in 1944). The first locomotives were ex-Usui Pass engines, minus rack gear.

 

The Tobu Nikko line is quite modelable - Tomytec made the single unit car, Masterpiece (if I can remember well) made the articulated car and Arumodel makes a locomotive which is quite similar.

 

Cheers NB

Edited June 25, 2013 by Nick_Burman

[Nick_Burman]

Those ED610 type electric locomotives look like slighly smaller cousins to the Sagami Railway ED10 types*.  Both types were built by Toyo Kouki/Toyo Denki. 

 

Unmotored HO scale models of which are still (as of last month) on sale at selected Sotetsu service centers.

 

http://homepage3.nifty.com/arumo/r0059.htm - this is even closer.

 

After the Nikko tramway closed the locomotive migrated to the Kurihara Railway, where it must have lasted until freight service went belly-up.

 

http://tsushima-keibendo.a.la9.jp/kurihara/kurihara.html

 

Cheers NB

Edited June 25, 2013 by Nick_Burman

[Densha]

NB,

I really like the scenery of that Kurihara railway. I noticed that in the last few pictures DMU under catenary, so in the last years they ran with diesels under catenary? That EMU pulling a freight train is also interesting to see.

[Nick_Burman]

NB,

I really like the scenery of that Kurihara railway. I noticed that in the last few pictures DMU under catenary, so in the last years they ran with diesels under catenary? That EMU pulling a freight train is also interesting to see.

 

In it's last days the Kurihara was so hard up that it decided that it was cheaper to tear the wires down (which it did in the end, presumably to recoup the value of the copper) and run using diesel cars - the wine-red affair seems to have come (Leased? Bought? Borrowed?) from the Watarase Keikoku Railway (yet another connection...this was once the JNR line to Ashio...) while the yellow and red "Nodding Donkeys" (to use the nickname applied to the British Rail "Pacer" units, also 2-axle) came from the Meitetsu where they ran the Yaotsu line (which was also de-electrified and subsequently closed, after a period of diesel operation).

 

AFAIK the rest of Meitetsu's diesel cars were sold to Burma, ooops, Myanmar. Don't know if the Kurihara units went the same way...I doubt it...

 

I think that MU car was just switching. A car like that would have had trouble ("snif, snif, what a funny burning smell...") dragging such a heavy train up to Hosokura Mine along that twisty line. Freight was the province of the road's 3 electric locos - the ex-Tobu boxcab and a pair of steeplecabs which dated from 762mm gauge days and which, when retrucked to 1067mm along with gauge conversion, looked all for the world like a Big Foot truck...

 

Cheers Nicholas

[marknewton]

Great thread, Nick!  :)

 

Cheers,

 

Mark.