Michael Kalus posted a photo:

The large Japanese characters across the top:
* 梅小路機関庫 (Umekoji Kikankō)
* Meaning: Umekoji Engine Depot

Michael Kalus posted a photo:

Class: C62
* Number: 2
* Operator: Japanese National Railways (JNR)
* Type: Express passenger steam locomotive
* Wheel arrangement: 4-6-4 (Hudson type)
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Technical Overview

Wheel Arrangement

* 4-6-4 (Hudson)
* 4 leading wheels → stability at speed
* 6 driving wheels → power
* 4 trailing wheels → support a large firebox

Designed specifically for high-speed passenger service

⸻

Boiler & Power

* Boiler pressure: ~16 kg/cm² (~1.6 MPa / 230 psi)
* Cylinders: 2 (outside)
* Valve gear: Walschaerts
* Grate area: large (to sustain high steam production)

⸻

Performance

* Power output: ~1,500+ hp
* Top speed: ~100–110 km/h
* Tractive effort: ~12,000 kgf

This was among the fastest and most powerful steam locomotives in Japan

⸻

Size & Weight

* Length: ~21 m (with tender)
* Weight: ~145 tons total
* Driving wheel diameter: ~1,750 mm

Large driving wheels = optimized for speed over raw pulling force

⸻

Historical Context

* Built in the late 1940s
* Notably:
* Many C62s were rebuilt from D52 freight locomotives
* Used on:
* Prestige passenger trains
* Mainline express services

C62 2 is especially famous for:

* Service in Hokkaido
* Pulling long-distance expresses like the “Niseko”

Just south-west of Kyoto Station, tucked into the old Umekoji rail yards, sits one of the nicest railway museums I've ever set foot in. The Kyoto Railway Museum (京都鉄道博物館) opened in its current, expanded form on 29 April 2016, built around the bones of the much older Umekoji Steam Locomotive Museum (1972) and the country's oldest reinforced-concrete roundhouse, completed in 1914. With 31,000 m² of exhibition space and more than fifty preserved vehicles on display, it is the largest railway museum in Japan, and it does something most museums don't: it tells the story of a country through its trains.

I spent the better part of a day there with a camera. What follows is a tour through the collection in roughly chronological order — Meiji-era industrial steam to the 1996 world-record-holding 500 Series Shinkansen — with a stop in the children's areas, because the place is unapologetically built to delight kids as much as adults.

First impressions: the great hall and the roundhouse

You walk in through the Promenade — a long open-air gallery of older rolling stock — and then the building proper opens up into a cathedral of a hall. Locomotives, carriages, EMUs, and a Shinkansen nose-cone all share the floor at the same eye level, and the sight lines are designed so that you can stand in one spot and see a century of Japanese railroading in a single glance.

The other showpiece is the Umekoji Engine Shed, a 20-track semicircular roundhouse arrayed around a working turntable. Built in 1914 and designated an Important Cultural Property, it is the oldest surviving reinforced-concrete car shed in Japan and is still used to store and rotate the museum's operational steam fleet.

The earliest era: Meiji-period steam

Japan's railways began in 1872 with a British-built line between Shimbashi and Yokohama, and a remarkable amount of that very early hardware survives. The collection's "deep history" pieces are a delight if, like me, you enjoy the look of nineteenth-century engineering.

The age of Japanese steam

By the 1930s the Japanese Government Railways were building serious mainline power of their own, and most visitors gravitate to these big black machines. The D51 is the icon — over 1,100 were built, and they hauled freight across every corner of the country. The first of the class, D51 1, is preserved at the museum.

The C62 went the other way: it was the largest and fastest passenger express locomotive ever built in Japan, and C62 2 — with its trademark stainless-steel "swallow" emblem on the smoke deflectors — used to head the prestigious Tsubame and Hatsukari services.

What sets Kyoto apart from most railway museums is that the steam fleet is not stuffed and mounted. There is a working maintenance shop on site where the operational locomotives are inspected, washed, and overhauled in front of you.

Diesel and electric: the post-war workhorses

After the war, electrification raced down the trunk routes and diesel-hydraulics filled in the gaps where overhead wires didn't reach. The collection covers both transitions in detail.

The electric side runs from the elegant pre-war EF52 built by Hitachi in the early 1930s — one of the first domestically designed mainline electrics — through to the muscular EF66, which spent decades on the prestige overnight sleeper trains and the heaviest container freights of the JNR era.

Electric multiple units and the limited expresses

The post-war story is also the story of the EMU — self-propelled electric trainsets that gradually displaced the locomotive-hauled express. The 80 series of 1950 was the breakthrough, the first long-distance EMU in Japan and the design that proved the concept could compete with locomotive-hauled trains.

That experiment matured into the famous 485 series limited express, which in its cream and red livery worked named services like the Raichō between Osaka and Kanazawa for decades, and became the visual shorthand for "limited express" across most of the country.

The Shinkansen story

The museum's centrepiece — and, I suspect, the reason most visitors come — is the Shinkansen collection. The original 0 Series, which opened the Tōkaidō Shinkansen on 1 October 1964 in time for the Tokyo Olympics, is here, and you can walk through it.

A few metres away, the wedge-shaped nose of the 500 Series points down the hall. When it entered service in 1997 it took the wheel-rail speed crown, running 300 km/h on the Sanyō Shinkansen — the fastest scheduled train on the planet at the time — and arguably it is still the most striking-looking high-speed train ever built.

The infrastructure floor: tickets, signals, and the unromantic bits

What I appreciate about the museum is that it doesn't just collect locomotives. It clearly inspired the Taiwanese Railway Museum in Taipei. A whole second-floor gallery is dedicated to the unglamorous-but-essential machinery that actually makes a railway work: signalling, ticketing, traffic control, permanent way.

The cultural side: trains as everyday life

Some of the most charming exhibits aren't rolling stock at all. There is a recreated Showa-era dagashiya* — a postwar penny-candy shop of the sort that used to sit just outside every neighbourhood station — and a wonderful collection of enamel headboard signs from the named expresses of the steam era. The Tsubame* ("Swallow") and Fuji** in particular are railway design classics.

A word about the kids

I want to call this out specifically, because it is the thing that surprised me most. A huge fraction of the museum is built around interactive displays aimed squarely at children, and they're not afterthoughts — they are some of the best-designed exhibits in the building.

The headline piece is the giant operating diorama and a wall of hands-on exhibits where kids (and, let's be honest, plenty of adults) can throw real signal levers, change track points, and run model trains around a layout. There are full-cab driving simulators based on the same units used to train actual JR drivers. There is a Kids Park with a slide built into a Dr Yellow Shinkansen. There are hands-on signalling, pantograph, and bogey demonstrations on the main floor that you can crank, push, and rotate. And there is a 1/80-scale diorama where children can crawl into a viewing well and watch the trains thunder past at eye level.

The most memorable, though, is the SL Steam ride. For an extra ticket, the museum runs you a kilometre out and back behind a real, live, steaming locomotive pulled from the working roundhouse fleet — about ten minutes of actual mainline steam haulage every visit day.

The combination is unusual. Most national-level transport museums I have been to fall into one of two camps: serious technical archives that are a slog for a six-year-old, or kid-focused theme experiences that don't reward a serious enthusiast. Kyoto somehow does both at once. The hardware is the real thing, the labelling is detailed and bilingual, but every other exhibit invites you to push, pull, sit in, or operate something. I watched a five-year-old operate a real signal lever and a sixty-five-year-old climb up into a D51 cab inside the same five minutes.

Sources

• Kyoto Railway Museum — Wikipedia
• Kyoto Railway Museum — japan-guide.com
• Kyoto Railway Museum — official site
• Kyoto Railway Museum: A Must-Visit for Families with Kids — Kyoto Travel
• Kyoto Railway Museum — Inside Kyoto

Today's links

• Ada Palmer's "Inventing the Renaissance": A tour-de-force, a magnum opus, a work of utter brilliance.
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: Gloating about the dot-bomb; RIAA sues PC-less family; John Deere v infosec; Foxconn v Wisconsin; Copyfraud x torturers' reputations; "Careless People."
• Upcoming appearances: London, Berlin, NYC, Barcelona, Hay-on-Wye, London, NYC.
• Recent appearances: Where I've been.
• Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Colophon: All the rest.

Ada Palmer's "Inventing the Renaissance" (permalink)

Ada Palmer may just be the most bewilderingly talented person I know: a genius sf writer, incredible librettist and singer, wildly innovative educator, and a leading historian of the Renaissance, and last year, she published her magnum opus, Inventing the Renaissance, a stunning book about so much more than history:

https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/I/bo246135916.html

All of my friends seem to be writing their magnum opuses these days! When (modern) historian Rick Perlstein and I did an event last year for my Enshittification tour, he told me he'd just finished his 1,000 page (ish? I may be misremembering slightly) history of the American conservative movement. And I recently had dinner with China Mieville, who told me he'd just turned in the manuscript for a novel he'd been trying to figure out how to write all his life.

I can't wait to read these books! And I couldn't wait to read Inventing the Renaissance, and I would have been much quicker off the mark but for the exigencies of book tours and books due and so on – but I've been reading it for the past two months or so, and I think I've pitched it about a hundred times to strangers and friends as I savored it, because it's just that good.

Inventing the Renaissance isn't a work of history, it's a work of "historiography" – the study of how histories get written and rewritten. Palmer's point here isn't to make us merely understand the Renaissance – she wants us to understand how the idea of a Renaissance, a rebirth out of a "dark age" into a "golden age" – has been used, abused, created and demolished, for centuries and centuries, including during the centuries when the Renaissance was actually underway.

Palmer teaches Renaissance history at the University of Chicago, where she is legendary for a unique annual pedagogical exercise in which she leads her students through a weeks-long live-action role-playing game that re-enacts the election of the Medicis' Pope. Every student is given a detailed biography of their character's position, goals, proclivities and history, and for weeks, the students scheme, ally, betray and assassinate each other. At the climax, the students take over the university's faux-Gothic cathedral, dressed in Renaissance drag (Palmer has a Google alert for theater companies that are selling off their costumes, and her tiny office at the university overflows with racks of cardinals' robes and other period garb), and they invest a Pope:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/17/against-the-great-forces-of-history/

This exercise is nothing short of genius, and the students who experience it often report that it is life-changing. That's because the final candidates are never quite the same, nor are the cardinals who cast votes for the winner. And yet, there are certain bedrocks that never shift, including the fact that Italy is always invaded by some of the factions involved in the election, though which cities burn also changes.

The point of this exercise is to expose the students to the power and limits of both "great historical forces" and the human agency that every one of us has within the envelope defined by those forces. Palmer wants her students to get a bone-deep understanding that while every moment has great forces bearing down on it, that the people of each moment have an enormous amount of leeway to channel the floodwaters that history will unleash. From the servant who bears a message from one great power to another, up to those great powers themselves, each person guides the course of history, even if they can't halt some of its outcomes.

Though Palmer unpacks this exercise and its meaning and results in the final part of her magnum opus, this message about forces and people is really the key to her historiography. She develops these themes in the most charming, accessible manner imaginable, weaving her own journey into history with her accounts of how different eras consciously created and deployed the idea of "the Renaissance" and how these ideas were bolstered, undermined, or ultimately demolished by new evidence. You could not ask for a better account of why there is not, and can never be, a single, canonical "history" of an era or a moment. There will always be multiple histories, overlapping each other, warring with one another, supplanting each other, or being revived as "lost" histories that reveal a truth that "they" have buried.

This is such an ambitious book, and the ambition pays off in so many ways. Take the book's structure: there's a long middle section in which Palmer describes how more than a dozen figures from the Renaissance experienced their era, with many overlapping events and timelines. Palmer's sensitive, beautifully researched and written accounts of the lives of these figures – highborn and lowly, sinister and virtuous – highlights the contradictions of this centuries-long "moment" we call "the Renaissance" and shows us how those contradictions can't ever be resolved, only acknowledged and understood.

This is Palmer the novelist, blending seamlessly with Palmer the historian. Palmer is a close literary – and personal – ally of the equally brilliant sf/fantasy writer Jo Walton, whose work has mined classical and Renaissance history to great effect since she and Palmer struck up their friendship. First, there were Walton's "Philosopher Kings" books, a three-book long thought experiment in which every person of every era who ever dreamed of living in Plato's Republic is brought through time and space to the doomed volcanic island that will someday give rise to the story of Atlantis, to try out Plato's ideal society for real:

https://memex.craphound.com/2015/01/13/jo-waltons-the-just-city/

Then there was Lent, Walton's story of the fanatical reformer Savonarola, who is forced to re-live his life over and over, with breaks in hell where he is tormented by his failure:

https://web.archive.org/web/20190516170659/https://www.latimes.com/books/la-ca-jc-review-jo-walton-lent-20190516-story.html

And this June, she'll bring out Everybody's Perfect, a novel that uses Palmer's trick of telling a story from many viewpoint characters, each of whom perceives the events so differently that their versions can't really be reconciled, except by understanding that there is no one history and there cannot be one history. There are only the histories, ever changing. The omnipotent third person narrator is a lie. I don't know if Palmer got this idea from Walton, or if Walton was inspired by Palmer, but it is a wonderful living example of how intellectual and creative movements (like those that are attributed to the Renaissance) feed one another.

One of Palmer's areas of specialty is free speech and censorship. Along with Adrian Johns, we co-taught a grad seminar called "Censorship, Information Control, and Information Revolutions from Printing Press to Internet" that connected Ada's work to the current battles over online speech:

https://neubauercollegium.uchicago.edu/research/censorship-information-control-and-information-revolutions-from-printing-press-to-internet

Palmer wants us to understand that the majority of censorship is self-censorship – that the Inquisition could only intervene in a tiny minority of cases of prohibited thought and word, and they had to rely on key people – printers, for example – anticipating the Inquisitors' tastes and limiting their speech without an Inquisitorial edict (if this seems relevant to the Trump administration's "war on woke," then you're clearly paying attention):

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/22/self-censorship/#hugos

Those correspondences between the deep historical record and our current moment make Inventing the Renaissance extremely important and timely – a book hundreds of years in the making, and bang up to date.

Hey look at this (permalink)

• Coyote vs. ACME | Official Trailer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H-43VeYGiPM

• From the Jew Bill to the Mamdani Act https://coreyrobin.com/2026/04/22/from-the-jew-bill-to-the-mamdani-act/

• This Alberta Startup Sells No-Tech Tractors for Half Price https://wheelfront.com/this-alberta-startup-sells-no-tech-tractors-for-half-price/

• Half of AI health answers are wrong even though they sound convincing https://theconversation.com/half-of-ai-health-answers-are-wrong-even-though-they-sound-convincing-new-study-280512

• Emails show Amazon colluding with other firms to raise prices, California authorities allege https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2026/apr/20/amazon-sellers-price-raises-california

Object permanence (permalink)

#25yrsago Gloating NYT editorial about the dotcom crash https://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/23/opinion/editorial-observer-after-the-fall-the-new-economy-goes-retro.html

#20yrsago RIAA sues family that doesn’t own a PC https://www.techshout.com/riaa-sues-local-family-without-computer-for-illegal-music-file-sharing/

#15yrsago Righthaven copyright troll loses domain https://web.archive.org/web/20110425035158/http://www.domainnamenews.com/legal-issues/righthavencom-invalid-whois/9232

#15yrsago Steampunk Venetian mask https://bob-basset.livejournal.com/160226.html

#5yrsago John Deere's dismal infosec https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/23/reputation-laundry/#deere-john

#5yrsago Foxconn's Wisconsin death-rattle https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/23/reputation-laundry/#monorail

#5yrsago Laundering torturers' reputations with copyfraud https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/23/reputation-laundry/#dark-ops

#1yrago Sarah Wynn-Williams's 'Careless People' https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/23/zuckerstreisand/#zdgaf

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

• London: Resisting Big Tech Empires (LSBU), Apr 25
  https://www.tickettailor.com/events/globaljusticenow/2042691

• NYC: Enshittification at Commonweal Ventures, Apr 29
  https://luma.com/ssgfvqz8

• NYC: Techidemic with Sarah Jeong, Tochi Onyebuchi and Alia Dastagir (PEN World Voices), Apr 30
  https://worldvoices.pen.org/event/techidemic/

• Barcelona: Internet no tiene que ser un vertedero (Global Digital Rights Forum), May 13
  https://encuentroderechosdigitales.com/en/

• Berlin: Re:publica, May 18-20
  https://re-publica.com/de/news/rp26-sprecher-cory-doctorow

• Berlin: Enshittification at Otherland Books, May 19
  https://www.otherland-berlin.de/de/event-details/cory-doctorow.html

• Hay-on-Wye: HowTheLightGetsIn, May 22-25
  https://howthelightgetsin.org/festivals/hay/big-ideas-2

• SXSW London, Jun 2
  https://www.sxswlondon.com/session/how-big-tech-broke-the-internet-b3c4a901

• NYC: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Jonathan Coulton
  (The Strand), Jun 24
  https://www.strandbooks.com/cory-doctorow-the-reverse-centaur-s-guide-to-life-after-ai.html

Recent appearances (permalink)

• Artificial Intelligence: The Ultimate Disruptor, with Astra Taylor and Yoshua Bengio (CBC Ideas)
  https://www.cbc.ca/listen/live-radio/1-23-ideas/clip/16210039-artificial-intelligence-the-ultimate-disruptor

• When Do Platforms Stop Innovating and Start Extracting? (InnovEU)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cccDR0YaMt8

• Pete "Mayor" Buttigieg (No Gods No Mayors)
  https://www.patreon.com/posts/pete-mayor-with-155614612

• The internet is getting worse (CBC The National)
  https://youtu.be/dCVUCdg3Uqc?si=FMcA0EI_Mi13Lw-P

• Do you feel screwed over by big tech? (Ontario Today)
  https://www.cbc.ca/listen/live-radio/1-45-ontario-today/clip/16203024-do-feel-screwed-big-tech

Latest books (permalink)

• "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/04/illustrious/#chairman-bruce

• "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025
  https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/

• "Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels).

• "The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (thebezzle.org).

• "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org).

• "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245).

• "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com.

• "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com

Upcoming books (permalink)

• "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/)

• "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026

• "The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027

• "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2027

• "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027

Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing: "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Third draft completed. Submitted to editor.

• "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. LEGAL REVIEW AND COPYEDIT COMPLETE.

• "The Post-American Internet," a short book about internet policy in the age of Trumpism. PLANNING.

• A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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Michael Kalus posted a photo: