The SCMAGLEV and Railway Park is a JR train museum located in the Port of Nagoya. Ironically, you need to take a non-JR train to get there and if you have a JR rail pass, that wont help you get in at a discount price. But if you like trains, this is a great place to visit. History documented in the museum dates back to the time of horse travel but preserved trains that date back to 1913.
Above is the interior of an train made in 1933, the Moha 1. The plastic rings are not original I think.
The orange green train is the Kuha 111 made in 1962.
I could not take a photo of the entire train model, to many people in the way. But they had a really cool setup that represented a large section of Japan, cities that stretch from Tokyo, through Nagoya and onto Hiroshima.
Above is looking down on the Nagoya Rock Festival.
Here is a model train pulling into some random station, I think this is suppose to be the back of Kyoto station.
Above is the Nagoya station model, it looks fairly accurate. Unlike reality though, the roller coster is not that close to Nagoya station.... That's in Mie Jazz Dream.
In the back ground, you can see the stadium the baseball team Carp plays at, Hiroshima's home team.
Above is the Kuha 381 (red and white) and Moha 52 (brown and white) trains. The Kuha 381 was built in 1973 and still in service today.
Above are old signs from the Taketoyo line, the train line I take daily to work. I did not understand the history of the Taketoyo line before visiting the museum. But I learned this train line existed before trains connected Tokyo to Nagoya. Supposedly the train station that I goto daily,
Kamezaki, is the oldest continuously operating train station in Japan.. but this was not covered in the museum.
From a US point of view, we are about to start talking science fiction. Above are Shinkansen series class 100 (left) and 0 (right). They were built in 1986 and 1971, the newer train is still in service but the older one was retired a few years ago. Top speeds of these two were 137 mph and 130 mph.
The above two trains are both prototypes. The 300X train traveled at 217mph and was made in 1994. The more pointy train in the background is the maglev train MLX01-1 made in 1995. It can travel at 361 mph. The maglev train will start service between Nagoya and Tokyo in 2025... that means we have about 14 years to figure out something faster and better in the US.
You can see the train Dr. Yellow in the background, that thing travels around inspecting the bullet train tracks.
It turns out the above building was once occupied by the Detroit Automotive Club Inter-Insurance Exchange, or what became AAA. So, it's kind of funny that today it's graffiti'ed with car references and recent events. Below is an image from Google maps, showing the same building in June 2009... We will have to check back in 2015, see what's up with AAA building.
Cork town, still nice.
