Part 1 of my favorite YouTube train thing: an Englishman stows away on freight trains across Canada.
Has sort of an amazingly funny epilogue in later videos
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this brings me to a topic i didn’t want to mention earlier on, namely that some metro/tube stations were planned to be used as shelters as well, and looking at those escalators, i wonder time and again whether that’s the case.
However, this is just one part of the story; the second, more important aspect is the design of the station in terms of crossing lines, infrastructure (roads/tunnels, shopping malls, different modes of transportation like Metros, tubes, regional and international crossing in one place at multiple levels), and also the environment, i.e. the type of ground they have been (forced) digging into, e.g. whether to cross a stream or river.
In Prague, some of the stations have pretty steep escalators, though with my limited camera Equipment, i.e. windows phone iirc, i couldn’t properly capture it. The only thing giving it away is the weird angle of the ceiling in some shots…
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7million views of a yellow train on a railroad crossing?
You cannot believe how rare and awesome this occasion is, and I am in awe that some nerds in japan know how to celebrate it for us…
servebot salutes you brave men and women…
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Doctor Yellow has lore besides just being yellow
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What’s the lore?
Dr. Yellow shot a man in reno just to watch him die
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The lore is that Yellow Magic Orchestra live there and play 24/7 concerts inside, right?
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Dr. Yellow is the train they use to test shinkansen express passenger routes, and it has a bunch of specialized instrumentation to ensure that the track and overhead wire are up to spec
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and he’s a hero for kids, plus an internet legend, moreso than the hello Kitty JR 500 series shinkansen (no, i am not kidding. Seriously!
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my favorite taiwanese train youtuber has fully lost it
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I don’t usually self-promote my podcast on the forum but we talked about Japanese train stations this week and I think it turned out pretty good
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Can’t wait to listen, thanks!
Wow, you should self-promote more. This is great! I love the historical context that’s given and the plethora of extra info that I can dive into.
Also, POV walking videos are now allowed in this thread as walking and train riding harmoniously coexist .
Thoroughly enjoyed this, thank you!
Only tangentially train related, but the train staff were extremely helpful throughout my brief Tokyo vacation in 2018. I got to ride one of these escalator lifts in the video and was just in awe. I’m anchored to the US because of my job and disability but given the first solid opportunity I’d like to go back to and maybe even live in an urban area of Japan, and the accommodations and quality of public transit is a big reason why.
Occasionally there were some stations without wheelchair access but thankfully due to the efforts of the accessibility community that mapped out good routes to take we were able to find alternatives. When that wasn’t possible, the staff helped get around obstacles like this. It was just stunning to me.
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What does their density of curb cuts and other small-business accomodations look like compared to an ADA-ified US?
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I only have my two-year old memories of game shops, arcades and otaku shopping districts to go off of but generally there were some pretty tight quarters to maneuver inside. Very tight aisles packed high up with shelving. I kept bumping into shelves and apologizing to staff in my broken tourist Japanese. I could sum the experience up by saying there is a lot less space to move around in general.
We were lucky not to run into an establishment that had a stairs-only entrance, but there were a few examples like Mikado in Takadanobaba that only had stairs going to the second floor. Super Potato Akiba had an especially egregiously-tiny elevator that you had to wedge a wheelchair into at an angle then turn slightly again to fit inside. The DiverCity mall in Odaiba, where we went to visit the Joypolis theme park where most attractions were closed off to disabled folk, had pillars blocking off the non-stair entrance but luckily a passerby was able to lift one out of the way. Elevators are maybe half the size of a standard example I’ve seen here.
I also have to add that we were fortunate to have rarely experienced rush hour within the train system since we were able to do our tourist thing and sleep in, not getting out of the hotel until around 10-ish. We headed back late once and were squeezed in by the train staff, and then again from the Odaiba trip we just took a taxi back. We needed to ask for help at our stops, but the staff made sure to have metal ramps to help me get on and off the train (they called ahead to make sure someone was waiting at our next stop)
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ooh i will listen to this on my morning walk tomorrow
i was not prepared for this kind of clickbait
and i sm puzzled what i just saw, and whether that’s second life in a nutshell applied to train sims…
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