Near the end of the 52 Fujis, I was out for my morning run when I happened across an old steam locomotive in a park. It’s always a nice surprise to stumble across one, especially the well-cared for examples who come with a pleasant aroma of machine oil wafting off them as they sit there looking splendid in their shiny black coats, exuding an assured air of solid reliability and permanence.
I got to thinking about making a list of park parked locomotives: a notion which lodged somewhere in the back of my head, until I had enough time & headspace to sit down & do it properly. I went on Wikipedia and did a search for some of the more common steam locomotive model numbers that I knew – the C57 and then the D51.
Over the next hour or so, I put together a spreadsheet of other models – the C11, the C51, the C55, the C58, the C60, the C62, the D50, the D52 and the 9600… those were just the models I remembered or could find nosing about the internet. I went and had a cup of tea & decided that this just simply wasn’t going to happen. I was drowning in steam trains.
I love lists. I love completing lists. This … this is not a completable list.
(Well, technically, I suppose, it’s a completable list. I did encounter a few Japanese blogs out there with enough interest and dedication to have logged visits to a not insignificant number of these lovable old locomotives. Particularly deserving of respect would be this website.)
I wasn’t dissuaded enough to completely give up; I returned to the lists and assembled as complete a map as I could manage, using the resources at my disposal.
I wasn’t able to find too much about private train line locomotives. Well, okay – that’s slightly disingenuous; I didn’t really bother, to be honest. There have been so many of them, I’d hardly know where to start. I put a few up, mixed in with the former Japan National Railways rolling stock. I’ll add more if and when I come across them.
In the end, this quick, just-for-fun, afternoon project ended up taking me the best part of a month, off and on. Turns out there are over 500 locomotives sitting in parks, museums, outside community centres, city halls, behind glass in factories, hiding in a warehouse in some rich train nerd’s garden… Phew.
Given the sheer volume of steam trains out there and the insane difficulty of trying to turn this into a completeable list, it is now, instead, a soft list, which means:
- I don’t hold myself to my usual ridonkulous completionist standards.
- I’ll just check off any that I can as I wander about in the course of my normal travels.
- I certainly don’t make any 700km journeys cross country just to go to a park and take a picture of one. Ahem.
A LIST OF POSTS
C11-1 Ome
8620 Ome
9608 Ome
E10-2 Ome
D51-452 Ome
2221 @ Ome
5540 @ Ome
Ome Railway Park
D51-8 – Daimotsu
C58-66 – Osaka Castle Grounds
D52-403 – Hiratsuka
D51-1072 – Kobe
C57-66 – Omori, Tokyo
C11-311 – Behind Koshien Stadium
9600-69655 – Kumamoto
C11-218 – Outside a Korean BBQ Restaurant
D51-1119 – Atsugi
D51-428 – Yukigaya, Tokyo
D51-469 – Hamadera
C57-139 – SCMAGLEV & Railway Park
C62-17 – SCMAGLEV & Railway Park
Ke 220 – Uwajima
D52-70 – Yamakita
D51-140 – Kumagaya
Ke-90 – SCMAGLEV & Railway Park
C58-395 – Hamura Zoo
C57-186 Koganei, Tokyo
SL no.7 – Atami
Type 110
C11 245 – Fujisawa
C57 26 – Gyoda City
CityHillsAndSea 