Heritage route
Tsugaru Stove Train
Tsugaru-Goshogawara → Tsugaru-Nakasato · Japan
Tsugaru Stove Train in pictures
Photographs by their authors, hosted on Wikimedia Commons · tap through for the licence
- Distance
- 21 km
- Fastest time
- 45 min
- Average speed
- 28 km/h
- Top speed
- 70 km/h
- Operator
- Tsugaru Railway
- Train
- 1948 Ohafu 33 coaches with coal daruma stoves, DD350 diesel
- Countries
- Japan
- In service since
- 1930
- Runs
- 12× daily; stove train 2–3× daily Dec–Mar
Figures are published values, not live data · corrections log
Aboard Japan’s northernmost private railway, attendants grill squid on pot-belly coal stoves while blizzards bury the Tsugaru plain outside.
Japan’s northernmost private railway crosses the snowbound Tsugaru plain to the hometown of novelist Dazai Osamu, and each winter it adds 1948-vintage coaches warmed by coal-burning daruma stoves. Attendants fan the coals and grill dried squid over them while ground blizzards whip off the Sea of Japan. The stove tradition is as old as the line itself, which opened in 1930.
How this line was checked
- Line drawn from OpenStreetMap relation 20977821 — 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
- Wikipedia has an article for this line
Along the way
- Snow-buried apple orchards
- Kanagi and the Dazai Osamu museum
- Ashino Park’s lakeside cherry trees
- Squid grilled on the daruma stove
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