From My Train Window

I love riding the Tokaido Line. “Tokaido” literally means East Sea Route in Japanese and it’s one of the oldest and most frequently used routes in Japan, which also include a vast network of rail lines , too. These photos below were taken from the train window.

Via Takasaki Station, I rode the Tokaido line up a winding stretch of track through sparsely populated pockets of small rural towns dotted along the outer fringes of nowhere. Places that hardly even exist in the minds of most people. A person was born here, lived, and died never once seeing anything other then his own little country hamlet grow empty and desolate and laying barren and wasted. These headstones are what’s left.( top pic)

Someone lives here. I’m sure it makes a comfortable home for someone who lives here. These ramshackle homes are so interesting to me. I just want to go inside one and look around. These are the types of structures you begin to see the farther you ride up into the countryside.

Ice cold and half frozen riverbeds and barren fields.

From the train conductor’s window I was able to finally see snow along the rails. It’s trips like this one that makes me never want to ride on a shinkansen; you miss out on so much scenery. Everything from a shinkansen window is a blur. I don’t mind capturing the local scenery from a local commuter line like this.

And then the snow really began to fall which is really cool if you have an appreciation for this type of weather and travel. The train ride is as much a part of the trip as the actually trip itself. I focus on the train ride.

This train continued on to Minakami Onsen.