DAVID P. MORGAN photography/WILLIAM K. VIEKMAN

I COME to think about it, I made my round-the-world circuit last year because of Japan. I was simply sitting in my office, minding my own business and wondering if I could raise the capital to buy a round-trip ticket to Tokyo (there to investigate 4-6-4's, traction, and other Far East culture), when a reader dropped by and asked, "Why just Japan? For $400 more you can go clear around." And so I did. Readers of this narrative may have assumed long since that Garratts, or at least narrow gauge in the Commonwealth and Empire, were my final reason for going abroad, but that would ignore the advice given to me prior to departure. I was told that practically anything on flanged wheels is to be found in abundance in Japan.

It's true, too. From the moment I stepped off the streamlined Kodama in Nagoya, after making the transition from the coolness and the Hudsons of Hokkaido island to the warmth and the catenary of central Honshu, I was aware that surrounding me was everything under trolley or alongside third rail that one could have seen in the U. S. in 1930-plus postwar Continental modernism.

In Nagoya itself (Japan's third largest city with a population of almost 1.4 million) there was time for a ride on the new (1957), short (1.63mile), but busy (18 million riders a year) subway, and I was impressed by the spacious station platforms, the wide (almost full-width) vestibule doors between cars, and the smooth

as-glass single-handle combination regenerative and air braking. Then minutes later we were speeding through the evening to Osaka on the world's first all-electric domeliner, Kinki Nippon's Vista Car [January 1959 TRAINS]. The Vista Car is not a dome train in our sense of the term, inasmuch as it lacks glass in front, rear, or overhead in deference to the 1500-volt D.C. trolley, but the view is better than average and there is such technology as disc brakes, air-suspension trucks, head-rest radios, train phones, and a mile-a-minute gait to divert the attention of the picayune. I was simply engrossed during the 118.3-mile run by the railway itself, for Kinki Nippon is a sort of super South Shore: 294 route-miles of mostly 4-foot 81⁄2-inch gauge . . . 1 million riders a day (average haul: 9 miles)

status as largest of Japan's 16 private electrics . . . ownership of Vista Car's builder, Kinki Rolling Stock Manufacturing . . . and operation of such diverse enterprises as department stores, baseball stadiums, a bus line (with dome vehicles), even a golf course.

Out of Osaka to Kyoto next day I was aboard the 55-mile Kei-Han Electric Railway, and these notes should suffice: red-and-yellow 600volt D.C. M.U. cars with red-plush seats; winding double track with roller-coaster grades and numerous grade-level crossings of intersecting street railways; speeds up to 70 per; and a Kei-Han terminal exclusive

whereby the bi-directional equipment unloads at the far end of the platform, then pulls up to a flower-potted bumper post to take on new riders.

AND THEN in Kyoto- but I should pause a minute to ask you this: Did you grow up in a town whose streetcar system possessed one-man, fourwheel Birneys? And if so, do you recall how they rolled about like a tramp steamer in the troughs of an ocean beset with a Force 7 gale — or how the boys coming home from school used to plague the motorman by crowding to the rear until the front axle lifted from the rails? Happily, I do. In fact, cartoonist Fontaine Fox attended Louisville Male High School years before I received a report card there and he got his initial inspiration for the Toonerville Trolley by gazing out the windows at the four-wheelers on the Brook Street car line. Anyway, the point is that a Toonerville actually operated in Kyoto until July 31, 1961. The Kyoto Municipal Transportation Bureau called it the No. 10 line. The No. 10, originally built in 1895 and 100 cars strong when the city took it over in 1915, was 3 feet 6 inch in gauge and, when I came upon it, a 4mile route protected by 28 cars (17 of them used daily for 1272 car-miles each 24 hours).

Toonerville rather than Birney in age and design, the cars were built by Brill in Philadelphia in 1905 and they were constructed of wood in the classical deck-roof tradition. Each

was 25 feet long, 6 feet wide, and 12 feet high; had a two-man crew together with seats for 20 and room for 23 standees; weighed 7.8 tons; and was propelled by two 25 h.p. motors of either Dick Kerr (England) or General Electric build. So tenderly cared for were these cars that it required 5 months to complete the shopping each one received every decade: two months to take apart and reassemble; three months to paint. Alas, No. 10 line lost about $200 a month and efforts of a few erudite souls in management to preserve it as an operating tourist attraction in San Francisco cable car fashion were unhappily in vain.

But last year the line was running, and talk about your clang-clangclang-went-the-trolley, why this was what Judy's been singing about all these years: the alternate winding up the controller, then the manual brake . . . the rock and sway of two axles who have apparently never been introduced formally . . . and the — well, let's just resolve the matter with the evidence in the photo above. I'm sorry the Kyotoans saw fit to terminate the No. 10 line, not alone because it typified every shady Elm Street car line in America from Fort Collins to New Albany but also because the little Brills were internationalists, as indeed their very presence in Kyoto for more than half a century proved so eloquently.

From Kyoto back to Osaka I was in the hands of yet another interurban, this one more American than the CA&E. The Kei-Han-Shin Kyuko Electric Railway, an 82-mile 1500- and 600-volt D.C. double-tracked standard-gauge line, ran big wine-red cars with stained wood and green-plush interiors-cars with dogmatic American air horns, cars that rolled up to 70 and 75 mph, cars that rolled so fast, in fact, that opposing trains thrust in the window frames and rattled the wooden casements with their passage. It was to quote my notebook again - exhilarating! But I should not underestimate the Hanshin Electric Railway, a 49-mile standard-gauge, 600volt D.C. interurban which has purchased most of its cars in the last six to seven years and which paints its modern equipment red and cream for express service, purple and ivory for local schedules. Because of its many stops average haul: 6.1 miles - the Hanshin is noted for its breath-taking acceleration and also for its rapid braking, again a combination of air and regenerative forces.

My hosts also showed me the 8.8mile Osaka subway as well as the green cars of yet another interurban, the Nankai Electric, but I trust no