Category: cool things!

After spending about an hour at the Great Buddha of Kamakura, the day was fast coming to a close and it was time to get back on the Enoden, in order to get to Enoshima before dark. AFter getting back to Hase station, there was a little time to kill before the next train, so I took a few pictures of the station itself, and a bit of the surroundings. The Enoden line goes almost as far back as there were trains in Japan, it was first laid down about 100 years ago, and many of the stations (and the neighborhoods around them) retain many traces of the older line.

In some ways, with the old wooden beams and the narrow gage tracks, some stations on the Enoden are reminiscent of some old West train stations, of course without the coal and water feeds that Western trains needed. Some of the train cars are modeled on the earlier cars of the line, as well, although with modern instrumentation and controls.

When the next train came, it was time for a quick ride. This is a short clip for the first leg from Hase, going to Gokurakuji station, one stop towards Enoshima, to give you a feel for what the ride was like. We didn’t actually get all the way to Enoshima, one of the stops before then looked interesting, a town called Shichirigahama, which turned out to be a very nice town indeed.

Oh, and notice the care that the conductor uses, there are specific gestures to each instrument, which work as mnemonics that the conductor uses to make sure that each item in his checklist is complete. The combination of hand and eye motion and examination of the control settings at the same time gives the conductor stronger reinforcement than simply moving his eyes to check the controls. My Japanese teacher used a similar approach to teach us how to write kanji characters, one of the steps was writing the character in the air while speaking the stroke numbers aloud. “Muscle memory” helps the “main memory”.

As always, there are more photos on my portfolio site.