High-speed route
Joetsu Shinkansen
Tokyo → Niigata · Japan
Joetsu Shinkansen in pictures
Photographs by their authors, hosted on Wikimedia Commons · tap through for the licence
- Distance
- 300 km
- Fastest time
- 1 h 29 min
- Average speed
- 202 km/h
- Top speed
- 275 km/h
- Operator
- JR East
- Train
- E7 “Toki”
- Countries
- Japan
- In service since
- 1982
- Runs
- 1–2× hourly
Figures are published values, not live data · corrections log
Dives under the Tanigawa range into Kawabata’s snow country. Tokyo to metres-deep Echigo-Yuzawa powder and Niigata’s sake coast in under ninety minutes.
This was Kakuei Tanaka’s monument: the Niigata powerbroker turned prime minister who willed a bullet line home across the mountains, opened in 1982. Its 22 km Daishimizu Tunnel ranked as the world’s longest rail bore on completion, and in winter the route doubles as Japan’s fastest ski shuttle, one station opening directly into the Gala Yuzawa pistes. The Toki name honours the crested ibis, nursed back from near-extinction on Sado Island off Niigata.
How this line was checked
- Line drawn from OpenStreetMap relation 1949288 — the same nodes OpenStreetMap holds for this railway, thinned to within under 25 m of them
- Checked against OpenStreetMap: the whole line lies on real track, a median 3 m from it
- The operator publishes this line's timetable: JR East — a place to look it up, not a check of our drawing
- Wikipedia has an article for this line
Along the way
- Jōmō-Kōgen for hot-spring country
- Daishimizu Tunnel — 22 km
- Echigo-Yuzawa and Gala Yuzawa pistes
- Uonuma rice paddies
- Bandai Bridge, Niigata
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