Kyoto Railway Museum Audio Guide

Kyoto Railway Museum: what does the audio guide cover?

1. 01

   Welcome to Kyoto Railway Museum

   Welcome to the Kyoto Railway Museum, known in Japanese as Kyoto Tetsudo Hakubutsukan. You are in Shimogyo Ward, in the city of Kyoto, inside the green space of Umekoji Park, a favorite spot for local people to relax. The museum opened on the twenty-ninth of April, 2016. It did not appear out of nowhere. Until 2016 this was the Umekoji Steam Locomotive Museum, a place devoted to steam engines that was founded to mark 100 years of railways in Japan. Its most famous structure, the fan-shaped engine house, carried over into the new museum unchanged. The museum is owned by the West Japan Railway Company and run by the Transportation Culture Promotion Foundation. Over the next few stops we will look at three things: the buildings, which are as historic as the trains, the Twilight Plaza with its roof made from recycled station parts, and the views and curiosities that make a visit memorable. Getting here is simple. The nearest station is Umekoji-Kyotonishi on the Sagano Line, about two minutes on foot, and the museum has no parking lot of its own, so public transport is the way to come.

2. 02

   Kyoto Railway Museum: The Fan-Shaped Engine House

   The heart of the museum's story is the fan-shaped engine house, built in 1914. Picture a roundhouse, where locomotives rest in bays arranged like the ribs of a folding fan around a central turntable. This one is the oldest surviving example built of reinforced concrete, and it is designated an Important Cultural Property of Japan. It is the part that survived from the old Umekoji Steam Locomotive Museum, so when you step inside you are standing in a building that was already there long before the museum took its present name. Steam locomotives were built from the early Taisho era through the 1940s, and the museum's predecessor kept the best known of them alive for visitors. Look up as well as across. Part of the fun is simply seeing how a building shaped for the needs of a locomotive, with its curved layout and its turntable logic, still frames these great machines more than a century after it went up.

3. 03

   Kyoto Railway Museum: A Roof with a Past

   Here is a wonderful bit of recycling. The Twilight Plaza displays the sleeper express Twilight Express alongside electric locomotives and sleeping cars that represent the postwar era. But look at the roof. The steel trusses, a pattern of interlocking triangles that carries the load, were taken from the platform canopy of the second Kyoto Station, built in 1914. In 1950 that second station burned down completely, yet this steel framework came through the fire. It went on serving for about 80 years, until work began in 1994 on the present, fourth station building. Now the same steel shelters the trains of a later age, only a short distance from where it began. When you stand under it, you are looking at a piece of Kyoto Station's earlier life, not a copy. It is a good reminder that the museum is a collection of buildings with stories, as well as a collection of vehicles.

4. 04

   Kyoto Railway Museum: The Old Nijo Station and Other Curiosities

   Near the end of your visit you will meet the old Nijo Station building, a wooden hip-and-gable-roofed structure from 1904. It was built to serve as the head office of the Kyoto Railway Company, later became Nijo Station on the Sanin Line, and stopped being a station in 1996. It was then designated a tangible cultural property of Kyoto City. It has been moved here, and today it works as the museum shop, so you can browse for souvenirs inside a piece of Meiji-era railway architecture. Some other details are worth hunting for. A model of the C63 steam locomotive recalls an engine that was designed in 1956 but never built, because railways were already moving toward electrification and diesel power. A former dining car of the type known as Nashi 20 now serves as a cafe. The container train locomotives, a former Osaka Loop Line commuter car, and electric locomotives such as the EF66 give a sense of the museum's range. Then climb to the outdoor Sky Terrace. From there you can watch trains on the Kyoto Line and the Tokaido Shinkansen. With luck, an N700 series bullet train will pass below the five-story pagoda of Toji, a World Heritage temple, and in the distance you may spot the Nintendo development building.

5. 05

   Before You Head Off from Kyoto Railway Museum

   The Kyoto Railway Museum invites you to see, touch and experience, and that works for children and adults alike. There is even a corner where animation and illustrations explain how railways work, so there is always something to learn on top of the heavy steel. As you wander, try a small game. Look for the places where the story of Kyoto's railways overlaps: the steel from an earlier Kyoto Station overhead, a Meiji-era station building turned into a shop, and a concrete engine house that is older than most of the trains it shelters. Each tells a different chapter. And when you step back out into Umekoji Park, take a moment to look around at the lawns and the open sky. The museum is part of the park, and the park is part of what makes this corner of Kyoto feel so welcoming. There is always another detail you missed on the first pass.