Japan: The rail system
Part 2 of a series
(Read Part 1)
When I’m not fuming over the pathetic mess that we in the UK are forced to call a railway system, I really like train travel. So I was excited to be taking several train journeys while in Japan—-one of them on the bullet train or shinkansen.
As I mentioned before, PD had lived in Japan for a while. Without her, I think that GS and I would have been a bit baffled by the railway system. It isn’t that it’s particularly complicated (there’s a helpful guide here), but there are enough quirks in the system that novice travellers would be confused. For a start, buying the tickets at Osaka wasn’t straightforward as the ticket machines had few labels in English. PD did really well with resurrecting her Japanese, and we all ended up with tickets to the right places. What GS and I would also not have known is that there are different categories of train which correspond roughly to different speeds of service. Not surprisingly, the faster services come at a premium, and you have to pay a supplement to the fare. There are also supplemental fees for seat reservations, but we opted for unreserved seats on the medium speed of service.
