Tachikawa Trains Guide: Railway History and Where to Watch Trains

A rail fan’s walk in Tachikawa: a “shortcut” line that is a detour, a vanished railway, jet-fuel trains to Yokota Air Base, and where to watch trains.

日本語で読む（Japanese version）

At the western end of Tachikawa Station there is a detour called a shortcut.

Its name is the Ome Tanraku-sen — the Ome Shortcut Line. Many of the trains that come from the Tokyo direction on the Chuo Line and turn onto the Ome Line take this track to Nishi-Tachikawa Station. Tanraku means a short cut, a direct link. Yet the Japanese edition of Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, states without a blush that this line is about 200 metres longer than the main line.

At first I thought it was a typo. A detour that calls itself a shortcut. In humans, this is a well-known excuse for getting lost.

As I dug further, I found other strange things running on Tachikawa’s tracks. A few times a week, a freight train loaded with jet fuel passes through Tachikawa Station, bound from the shore at Tsurumi, near Yokohama, to the US forces’ Yokota Air Base. At the southern edge of the station there was once a roost for steam locomotives. The busiest station in the Tama area — the western half of Tokyo beyond the 23 central wards — leads a rather busy double life that its commuters know nothing about.

Why is the shortcut a detour? The answer lay in a railway that has already disappeared from the map.

What is the Ome Shortcut Line? West of Tachikawa Station, the tracks tie a knot

First, let us look at the shape of the tracks at Tachikawa (立川) Station.

According to the encyclopedia, Tachikawa Station has four island platforms and eight tracks, plus four more tracks for freight, stabling and shunting. Three JR lines meet here — the Chuo, Ome and Nambu Lines — and the Chuo Line has two platforms and four tracks. Nambu Line platforms 7 and 8 are only long enough for six-car trains and cannot reach the Chuo Line. In the same station, the Nambu Line platform alone lives on an island set a little apart.

Trains for the Ome Line leave from platforms 1 and 2 and from platforms 4 to 6. In the same entry, the encyclopedia explains that trains leaving platforms 4 to 6 run, until just before Nishi-Tachikawa Station, on a track separate from the Ome Line main line: the “Ome Shortcut Line”. It is single-track, and no regular passenger trains run over it in the up direction, towards Tokyo. And then comes that sentence. It is a detour of about 200 metres.

Why go to the trouble of a longer track? To avoid crossing on the level. A link line was built from Tachikawa to Nishi-Tachikawa so that westbound Chuo Line trains and Nambu Line trains could join the Ome Line without cutting across the Chuo Line tracks. Think of the person who, rather than wait at a level crossing, climbs the footbridge. The walk gets longer, but they never bump into anyone. The Ome Shortcut Line is a footbridge for trains.

The route of the line has been written down, too. Soon after leaving Tachikawa Station it parts from the Chuo Line, merges with a track coming from the Nambu Line side, and starts to climb an embankment. It curves right and crosses over the Chuo Line, and around the level crossing beyond there is a patch of ground like a grassy empty lot. That, it is said, is where a station called Musashi-Kaminohara once stood. Beyond it, the line runs right beside houses, crosses the Zanbori River, joins the Ome Line main line and arrives at Nishi-Tachikawa.

A closed station. With those words I finally stood at the entrance to the mystery. This track had not been laid for the Ome Line in the first place.

The vanished Itsukaichi Railway: the shortcut is a keepsake from another railway

Today, the only railway between Tachikawa and Haijima is the JR Ome Line. But at the beginning of the Showa era there was another line in this stretch: the Itsukaichi Railway.

According to the encyclopedia, the Itsukaichi Railway was a company that linked the town of Tachikawa in North Tama District — today’s Tachikawa City — with the village of Okuno in West Tama, today’s Hinode. It opened its Haijima–Itsukaichi section in the mid-1920s, and in July 1930 extended from Haijima to Tachikawa. On this section it built a station for each hamlet, so the stations were close together. To reach Tachikawa Station it climbed over the Chuo Main Line on the west side and connected directly with the Nambu Railway’s tracks on the south side. The Nambu Railway used the south side of one platform and the Itsukaichi Railway the north side. Its trains were petrol-engined railcars.

The City of Tachikawa’s chronology also records, under 1930, “Itsukaichi Railway opens to Tachikawa.”

The following year, in November 1931, a 2.1-kilometre line opened as a freight link for the Nambu Railway, joining Tachikawa Station with Nishi-Tachikawa Station on the Ome Electric Railway. For part of the way it shared the Itsukaichi Railway’s track. It was the line that branched off the Itsukaichi track at Musashi-Kaminohara and ran to the Ome Line at Nishi-Tachikawa.

Why were these private railways so keen to join their tracks together? In the encyclopedia’s entry for the Nambu Line, a name appears: Asano Soichiro, head of the Asano cement conglomerate. Asano had brought the Ome Railway under his control and was shipping limestone, the raw material for cement, from Ome via the national Chuo Main Line, Yamanote Line and Tokaido Main Line to his factory in Kawasaki. If he controlled the Nambu Railway, which linked Kawasaki and Tachikawa, he could carry it all on his own group’s lines, and over a much shorter distance. The Itsukaichi Railway, too, reckoned that by connecting with the Nambu Railway at Tachikawa it could carry limestone dug at Mount Katsumine all the way to the Kawasaki factory without using the government lines, and applied for permission in 1923.

The tangled tracks west of Tachikawa Station were born of one industrialist’s abacus: his wish to get limestone to the seaside as cheaply as possible.

Then the times turned towards war. In 1940 the Itsukaichi Railway merged into the Nambu Railway and became its Itsukaichi Line. In April 1944 the Nambu Railway and the Ome Electric Railway were bought by the state as important lines for carrying limestone and cement. The City of Tachikawa’s chronology records under that year: “Ome, Nambu and Itsukaichi railways purchased by the Japanese National Railways.”

In October of the same year, the former Itsukaichi Railway track between Tachikawa and Haijima was suspended as a “non-essential line”, on the grounds that it ran parallel to the Ome Line. According to the encyclopedia, its rails were taken up and reused between Kanazu and Awara stations in Fukui Prefecture. Tachikawa’s rails did not cross the sea, but they did travel all the way to a hot-spring town.

Not everything vanished, however. The track from Tachikawa Station to Musashi-Kaminohara, still joined to the link line from Musashi-Kaminohara to Nishi-Tachikawa that the Nambu Railway had laid, was kept as a connecting track for the Ome Line. That is today’s Ome Shortcut Line.

Half the mystery was solved. The shortcut is a detour because it was never designed as a shortcut: it is simply the track of a vanished railway, still in use. For a time JR is said to have called it the “Ome Third Line”. Today “Ome Shortcut Line” is its official name. Only the name became a shortcut.

A station of gravel and limestone: Tachikawa as a freight junction

Trace the history of the Ome Line and you find freight there before passengers.

The encyclopedia’s entry for the Ome Line says that because the line was originally built mainly to carry limestone, its timetable was once built around freight trains. And it quotes a satirical verse, in the 5-7-5 form of a senryu, made by the passengers of the day:

“On the Ome Line, the gravel looks more important than the people.”

Nobody knows who wrote it. But you can picture the scene vividly: kept waiting on the platform while wagons heaped with gravel roll past at their leisure. There was a time when human commuters gave way to gravel.

The chronology of Tachikawa Station is full of traces of freight, too. In 1916 a freight branch opened between Tachikawa and Tamagawara stations; it was suspended in 1946, which in practice meant closed. In 1920 the Ome Railway opened a freight branch from Tachikawa to Kamikoshinden. Down to the gravel beds of the Tama River, up to the villages on the plateau. Before it was a station where passengers changed trains, Tachikawa was a station where goods did.

Tachikawa Station stopped handling freight on 1 April 1980. Nishi-Kunitachi Station on the Nambu Line handled freight from 1951 to 1963. Nishi-Tachikawa on the Ome Line stopped in 1971.

The limestone trains of the Ome Line ran for the last time on 13 August 1998. These trains, from Okutama Station to Hama-Kawasaki on the Nambu Line, also used the Ome Shortcut Line. The track born of Asano Soichiro’s abacus kept carrying his limestone until well after the Showa era had ended.

So what do the freight trains on the shortcut carry today?

The fuel train to Yokota: the “Yonetan” that slips through Tachikawa Station

The answer is jet fuel.

According to the encyclopedia’s entries for the Ome Line and the Ome Shortcut Line, a dedicated freight train carrying aviation fuel for the US forces’ Yokota Air Base runs between Anzen and Haijima stations. Anzen is a station on the Tsurumi Line in Tsurumi Ward, Yokohama. The train travels by the Tsurumi Line, a Nambu Line branch, the Musashino Line’s freight route and the Nambu Line, then from Tachikawa Station along the Ome Shortcut Line to Haijima on the Ome Line. Among rail fans this train of tank wagons is known as the Yonetan (米タン) — “US tanker”: 米 is the character Japanese uses for America, here read yone, and tan is short for tank.

A transport news site wrote in 2020 that it runs about twice a week, and a travel site says it runs about twice a week, mainly on Wednesdays and Thursdays. The encyclopedia notes there was a period when it ran more often after part of its route changed in March 2014. The frequency seems to vary over time. What is certain is that through the busiest station in Tama, on the same tracks as the commuters, passes fuel bound for an air force from the far side of the Pacific.

At Haijima, the tank wagons swap their electric locomotive for a diesel, because the line to the base is a non-electrified single track. According to the encyclopedia’s entry for Haijima Station, this Yokota Base line is managed by JR Freight; it crosses the Tamagawa Aqueduct and the Itsukaichi Kaido road by bridge and level crossing, runs about 500 metres to the fence at the base entrance, and continues on inside the base. According to the travel site, it began in 1937 when the Imperial Japanese Army laid a siding to the Kumagawa fuel depot, a facility of the Army Air Arsenal. US fuel now runs on a pre-war army track. And that fuel always passes through Tachikawa Station. On the rails, too, Tachikawa and Yokota are relatives. (For the story of Tachikawa’s own base, see our base-history article.)

The same site writes, citing the people it interviewed, that the train runs more often when the international situation grows tense, so few runs are taken as a sign of peace. When I read that sentence, my hands stopped on the keyboard for a while. The rare train that rail fans long to see: the less often it runs, the calmer the world is. It is unusual for a train to be so welcome for not being seen.

Fuel trains have a bitter memory here, too. The City of Tachikawa’s chronology records under 1964: “Runaway unmanned tank wagon causes fire accident in Tachikawa Station yard.” The encyclopedia says it was a US military tank wagon that ran away, struck the station and exploded, and adds that the Daiichi Department Store was built on the burnt site. The streets of Tachikawa’s South Exit have passed through a fuel fire once.