Kitayama Rail Pages

About Kitayama Rail



Prefecture pages

There is one page for each of the 47 Japanese prefectures. The page consist of three blocks; the links, the line tables and the statistics.
Links
From here you can go to all main pages and the pages for the adjacent prefectures. You will also find links to the different sections in the line tables block.
Line tables
"Line tables" is a set of tables with all railway lines in the prefecture. It's divided into five sections:
  1. Shinkansen lines
  2. JR lines (other than the Shinkansen lines)
  3. Non-JR lines
  4. Metro (Subway/Underground) lines
  5. Tramways
Each table has the same layout:
Name Major stations Length
(km)
Comments
JR Hokkaidō
ChitoseTomakomai - Numanohata - Minami-Chitose - Shiroishi - Sapporo 56.6

Line pages
The lines are grouped into "Line pages". All major lines have their own page, minor lines are grouped per perfecture on one or several pages.
Header
The header is just a list of lines on this page. From each row in the list, there's a link to the line section.
Example of header list:
Railway Line
Hakone Tozan
Izu HakoneDaiyūzan
JR CentralGotemba
Line section
The section is divided into blocks for each railway. The full names in Japanese and English are shown in italics below the short name, if I have been able to find them! For each railway are the lines listed. The line type is shown in italics below the line name if it is something else than a normal JR /Non-JR line. Explanation of the station table:
Statistics
This page is a list of all 47 prefectures in Japan together with some general and railway-specific data about them. Most columns are self-explanatory.
Just some comments:
The length of the prefecture's railways is based on the data compiled by me when creating the "Kitayama Rail Pages".
The railway density is a measurement that shows how much railways the prefecture has related to its area. Data for some other countries: Germany 127, Switerland 123, Belgium 123 (the three top in the world); Sweden 27.
The railway penetration is a similar measurement to show how much railways the prefecture has per capita. Data for some other countries: Canada 260, Australia 256, Sweden 140, New Zealand 140 (top four in the world); Switerland 72.

Line index
The line index is an alphabetic list of all lines with hyper links to the corresponding Line page. If a line doesn't have a specific name, the railway name is used, but marked with a "*" after the name to indicate that the name is a railway name and not a line name! I have sometimes added an "extra" name to distinguish between branches, translated a part of the name etc. Such "extra" names are within ().

Station index
The station index is an alphabetic list of all stations listed in Kitayama Rail Pages with hyper links to the corresponding Line page. You can also open a Mapion or Google map for the station in a new window by clicking on the "Map" link.

History
I've always been interested in railways - particularly in timetables and maps. I love to travel by train and enjoy the scenery from the seat and to walk around in busy or rural stations. The interest for Japanese railways started on a vacation trip to Asia in 1993. I realised that Japan had an extensive rail network, that I wanted to explore, either at home as "Desktop traveller" or in real life on the rails. But, both the language and the distance was a huge barrier to get information about the Japanese Rail network. However, I managed to get some information. I found a good atlas (Teikoku) on a sale in a Stockholm book-shop. That's how my deep interest for Japan's railways started. Finally I get hold a a timetable book from 1993. The latter one is a challenge itself, as it is completly in Japanese. I decided to do a "survey" - a list of all railways in Japan. In the summer 2001, I started the survey, and used Internet a lot to find all the information I wanted. I stored the information in Excel. After a while I realised that there was nothing like my list in English on the Internet. I decided to learn a bit about HTML and create a site. Nowadays you can find a lot of similar information in Wikipedia, but I have decided to keep my work updated! The first version of the site was published in October 2001 with just a few prefectures. I realised that it wasn't fun. A lot of boring typing of HTML-code. I took a new approach; all the information is stored in an Oracle database on my PC. I'm using PL/SQL-scripts to generate the web pages. Much faster, much more reliable, fewer errors etc. A disadvantage of this approach is the the pages could be a bit "to structured". In April 2002 I finished the complete list of all rail lines in Japan with their major stations. It's continously updated with the network changes.
This page is updated Oct 02, 2023