Japan

Shinkansen to Kyoto

B Byrd

— 2 min read
Shinkansen to Kyoto

On Friday we said goodbye to Tokyo to head to Kyoto on the Shinkansen (bullet train – technically "new trunk line", but that's pretty boring). These fast trains (about 2.5 hours for our trip) join lots of major cities (and other areas) of Japan and are famously fast, safe and reliable. Apparently their average deviation from being on time is around 24 seconds. However, we encountered our second example of train delays here, with our departure being delayed about 40 minutes. Apparently there were track-side fires that needed to be taken care of, so that's probably fair!

Our train actually arrived at the station about 5 minutes late. But it was then marked out of service, with limited updates about what the issue was and when we might depart. Eventually we got a little more info from the generally good signage telling us about the fire-fighting. Google translate of the announcements gave a little more detail, but wasn't always reliable.

A correctly interpreted this as the 643 (our train) will leave the platform to turn around and then come back for boarding.

Eventually we did get on the train, which was quiet, comfortable and fast – we saw a top speed of 284km/h (a bit under the 300–320km/h they sometimes hit and a bit faster than 244km/h in Italy).

Our train wasn't very full. We had reserved seats right at the back as these come with reserved 'oversized' bag storage which we figured we needed for our ski gear bag (we probably could have gotten away without it – someone else stashed their bag there unreservedly – but it was handy to not need to haul all of our other bags onto the overhead shelf.

And after all that, we arrived in Kyoto about 40 minutes late. Funnily enough, we also briefly ran into our Tennessean sushi-making colleagues at Kyoto station – it's a small world!

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