Prototype information sources

[ozman2009]

I'd be grateful if anyone could point me to sources of information (ie mainly websites) about the Japanese prototype, in English. I'm afraid that my knowledge of the Japanese language could be written on a postage stamp in large bold capital letters.

[railsquid]

A good starting point is Wikipedia, though the English version's coverage is not as extensive or detailed as the Japanese.

 

What kind of information are you looking for exactly?

[gr-ex]

I'd be interested in these sources too if anyone has any.

 

When finding info about trains in the past I've always used Google Japan ( google.co.jp ) as it seems to provide the best results.

[railsquid]

Oh, a possible strategy for looking up pictures is to look up the English entry in Wikipedia, find the Japanese entry, copy the title and paste it into Google (like gr-ex says, google.co.jp is better as it will focus more tightly on Japanese sources).

[ozman2009]

"What kind of information are you looking for exactly?"

 

What I mainly had in mind was information about and photos of the various types of trains (locos, coaches, wagons etc), and a brief history of railways in Japan. I'd also like to find out a bit about the various lines, which members often refer to in their posts.

[railsquid]

Well Wikipedia is definitely a good starting point then and might contain links to other resources. You can always ask here about specific items, someone might know something.

[bikkuri bahn]

Online resources are piss-poor.  If you are serious about the topic, better to start your own library.  A good start would be the books published by JRTR, but alas, they appear to be OOP:

http://www.jrtr.net/publications/index_publications.html

 

Learning Japanese opens up a whole galaxy of information, but that is beyond the scope or motivation of many.

 

As railsquid says, specific questions can usually be answered on this forum.

[kvp]

A common trick is to find the english wikipedia page, find the japanese from there, then first translate the page with google, then copy the japanese (untranslated) name of the train in question and look it up on google.co.jp. Any results could usually be also translated with google. This way it's possible to find most information that is online and contains at least the type name of the train. Sometimes, when the english wikipedia doesn't have a page, i just find a similar but numerically different type and change the number field before searching. (actually knowing some japanese would help a lot, but it's possible to get by even if your computer doesn't even have japanese fonts installed, but in that case, all japanese characters will look like a rectangle to you, instead of looking like a bunch of mysterious lines)