From left to right: original livery, 6-cars formation (1992-1995) and the 7-cars formations in the old (1995-2001) and new (2001 to 2010) liveries.

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All the necessary dependencies are either included in this package or are avaible on the DLS.

(Consists are included! Don’t bother with placing individual cars!)

As we all know well, the Japanese Shinkansen is special among high-speed railways, as it is entirely confined within it’s own infrastructure, to the point of being conceptually inseparable from it: a new Shinkansen services equals directly the construction of new Shinkansen infrastructure. This is in contrast with “European” high-speed rail systems, where this correlation between the “train” and it’s “infrastructure” is a bit more fuzzy, as high-speed trains are able (and the whole network was designed with the intent) to run both on dedicated high-speed railways, as well as conventional railways, either on approach to the “historic” city-center stations, or on the “outer parts” of their services, where construction of a dedicated high-speed railway line is considered unsuitable due to higher costs in comparison to perspective revenue earnings (for instance, within the German ICE system the correlation between “train” and “infrastructure” is even almost entirely nill).

This is a double-edged sword – on one hand, with a system that entirely requires it’s own infrastructure, it is definitely harder to “half-ass” the extension of high-speed railway services, from both a political as well as technical-economic perspective: high speed “farces” where an high speed train only runs on conventional lines, or for only a minimal part of it’s journey (while retaining the same fare price as “normal” high-speed trains) are nearly impossible to do with a Shinkansen-style system.

On the other hand, you still cannot “half-ass” extension, wich means that medium-sized towns and places that have the potential demand for an improved, high-quality and fast Inter-City service need to be excluded a priori as building the completely segregated infrastructure carrying these services would not make any economic sense, with construction costs potentially never recouped by ridership revenue, not even in the very long term.

This problem, or better, inherent limitation of the system, was already well understood by JNR engineers working on Shinkansen planning togheter with the national and prefectural governments.

The choice of a completely segregated infrastructure was of course a foreced one: there was simply no (safe) way to attain high-speeds on 1067mm gauge tracks: adopting any other track gauge would’ve obliged the construction of an entirely new “network”, completely segregated from the main “conventional” one (to this end, the shinkansen could very well be even broad-gauge, the result would’ve been the same).

To address this, more specifically the issue of “how do we bring quality higher-speed services to towns and places that do not warrant the construction of an entirely dedicated new Shinkansen line”, JNR engineers dabbled into the “Super-Tokkyu” concept between the 1970s and the early 1980s: the idea was instead to extend the Shinkansen, to straighten and upgrade to near-Shinkansen standards (and predisposing them for an eventual long-term conversion to full-Shinkansen standard) sections of the existing 1067mm narrow gauge lines, allowing for specially-designed limited express trains (or “upgraded” standard ones) to reach up to 160Km/h on them, allowing higher speeds than conventional limited express trains, while being able to run for the rest of the journey on normal “conventional lines” at “normal” limited express speeds.

The concept unfortunately never fully saw the light of day, as the planned lines were curtailed one after the other, due to budgetary constraints – only the Hokuetsu Express line, with it’s former 160Km/h service speed exists as a “spiritual heir” to the idea. 

The idea was sound, if not intruiging , but at the time, due to the poor financial status of JNR, it was relegated to the bottom of the priority list. Only after JNR’s privatization in 1987, the issue of extending Shinkansen services outside their specially-built infrastructure the issue resurfaced again: by then all major cities whose passenger demand warranted (or made economically viable) the construction of an entirely segregated infrastructure had been connected, or were being connected, with said infrastructure being under construction.

In particular, Yamagata city, with it’s population of roughly 250’000 residents, was increaingly, and vociferously asking for an improved and direct connection to Tokyo, then only handled either by the “Tsubasa” limited express trains, with a meager five daily rountrips between Yamagata and Fukushima (where passengers were supposed to transfer to the Shinkansen, for a total of three hours and nine minutes of travel time) or by the daily Akebono sleeper train, an option that was rather impractical.

The final impetus towards serious consideration for a Shinkansen service to Yamagata came in the mid-1980s, as the city was selected to host the 47th “National Sports Festival” (a sort of “domestic olympics”-type of event), scheduled for 1992.

Plans to get a Shinkansen-style service to Yamagata actually had existed for some year in the form of Mr. Suichiro Yamanouchi’s (JNR’s manager for north-of-Tokyo lines, and soon after, vice-president of the newly formed JR East) musing and notes: inspired by the french TGV practice, he first drafted the first concepts to extend Shinkansen services onto conventional lines in 1983, with Yamagata city as case-study (the rationale being to serve the popular skiing resorts of the area). Depsite some interest from fellow colleauges, wich helped with detailed drafting and planning for the Yamagata extension, the plan was ultimately rejected by JNR’s higher-ups, as privatization loomed. The project finally gained serious traction after bypassing the JNR upper management entirely, as Mr. Yamanouchi presented his plans to diet representatives and other elected officials from Yamagata prefecture, wich were enticed by the idea.

Using the scheduled sports festival as leverage, the “Yamagata Shinkansen” project finally got the go-ahead in 1988, as funding was reluctantly granted by the Ministry of Finacnes, wich remained rather skeptical of the concept overall. In the same year, the newly-formed JR East and Yamagata Prefecture decided to jointly fund the extension, rahter than leaving the whole burden on the national government, by forming a special ad-hoc company: “Yamagata-JR Direct Express Holdings”, tasked with being essentially a funding “piggy bank” for infrastructural works, and the owner of the rolling stock to be used on the line (to be brought jointly by JR East and Yamagata Prefecture, and to be leased to the former for normal operation).

In actual infrastructural terms, Mr. Yamanouchi’s TGV-inspired solution was essentially the opposite of the old “Super-Tokkyu” concept of 1970s JNR: instead of bringing “conventional lines” to near-Shinkansen standard, the idea was to have Shinkansen trains run on actual conventional lines, with little or minimal alignment alterations. This of course posed a handful of issues, due to the need to somehow interface a network with a wide loading gauge, 25’000v AC 50Hz electrification and, most importantly, 1435mm standard gauge, with a narrow loading gauge network with 20’000v AC 50Hz electrification (in Yamagata’s case) and 1067mm gauge tracks.

The solutions were essentially pragmatic: 1435mm gauge prevailed – the conventional lines would’ve been re-gauged to 1435mm (while retaining local services, in the form of adequate electric multiple units built for or adapted to standard gauge). For the loading gauge it was instead to be the opposite: the narrow 1067mm gauge was to be retained (as enlarging tunnels and adapting the rest of the infrastructure to the Shinkansen’s wide loading gauge was extremely expensive) with the inevitable “gap”at “full-Shinkansen” platforms to be filled by retractable steps. Electrification was the one that actually posed the least amount of problems: the new Shinkansen trains would’ve been just multi-voltage sets.

Dubbed “Mini-Shinkansen”, construction works, chiefly the regauging of the Ou Mainline between Fukushima and Yamagata to standard gauge, began in late 1988. At around the same time, the first concrete steps were undertaken in regards to the construction of the extension’s special rolling stock.

It’s here that we finally see the birth of the 400 Series, the first entirely new Shinkansen design of the newly-formed JR East.

Being a train planned to fit the same loading gauge of conventional trains, the 400 Series used the 20m bodyshell lenght and 2945mm width rather than the Shinkansen’s 25m and 3380mm respectively. Trains were to be formed of six cars, to be coupled to longer 200 Series trains (running Yamambiko services) for the leg of the journey on the Tohoku Shinkansen, between Fukushima and Ueno.

As such, the 400 Series had to be designed to be entirely compatible with it’s JNR-era brethen, and thus had to fetaure a handful of slightly obsolete technical fetaures, such as a thyristor-phase traction control.

While they shared a good deal of technical equipment with the 200 Series, in regards of styling, the 400 Series threw it out of the ball park: an unmistakeably sleek, stylish, elegant and modern appearance, with a tapered front nose, top-mounted quadruple headlight and especially a blue-hued stainless steel paint coupled with a black band around the passenger windows, bottomed by a thin bright green line, Yamagata prefecture’s colour.

Built by Kawasaki Heavy Industries and Tokyu Car Co. with Hitachi electrical equipment,a “protoype” set, S4, was delivered in October 1990, and after a brief presentation to the press on October 26th, it was immediately put on test runs along the Tohoku Shinkansen, awaiting the completion of the hefty regauging works of the Ou Main line.

As these works came near completion, the remaining eleven 400 Series sets planned to be run on the Yamagata Shinkansen began to be delivered in the first half of 1992 at a rate of two per month: set L2 (the prototype S4 being since renamed to L1) being delivered on the 17th of January, followed eleven days later by set L3, set L4came on the sixth of March, L5 on the 23rd, L6 on the 2nd of April, followed by set L7 eleven days later, L8 on the 1st of May and L9 on the 11th, L10 on the 29th of May and finally sets L11 and L12 were delivered on the 12th and 25th of June, bringing the 400 Series fleet to completion.

Five days later, on the 1st of July 1992 (during the National Sports Festival), the Yamagata Shinkansen was officially opened to the pubblic, with trains running seamlessly between Yamagata and Tokyo (to Ueno Station) for the first time since the opening of the Tohoku Shinkansen, with a travel time of two and a half hours (shaving 40minutes off the previous travel time) and with daily 14 rountrips, inheriting the “Tsubasa” service moniker from the limited express they replaced.

The Yamagata “Mini-Shinkansen” was a success: not only ridership fullfilled expextations – it even went beyond, warranting the necessity to add an additional car to all 400 Series trains in late 1995, bringing the formations to 7-car sets. These cars were directly purchased and owned by JR East, unlike the rest of the trains they were in, owned jointly by Yamagata Prefecture, a signal of JR East’s growing confidence in the concept.

The Mini-Shinkansen idea was so successful that many other proposals for similar concepts in other areas of Japan were put forward.

The second Mini-Shinkansen line opened in 1997, the Akita Shinkansen, connecting Tokyo to the namesake city and prefecture.

Plans to extend the existing Yamagata Shinkansen northwards, to Shinjo were also being made, with some proposals already starting in 1993. The final go-ahead came in 1997, with JR East recieving 35,1 bilion yen (enough to cover most construction costs) from the “Yamagata Prefecture Tourism Development Corporation”, an entity set up by Yamagata Prefecture (in a similar vein as the Yamagata-JR Direct Express company a decade earlier) to fund the extension, this time almost entirely covering the costs by itself, the first (and to this day the only) prefecture to do so.

The northwards extension finally opened on the 4th of December 1999, with Tsubasa trains now reaching Shinjo. To operate services on this new extension three new Mini-Shinkansen sets were procured, not of the 400 Series, but of the comparatively modern E3-1000 Series, these being derived from the E3 Series trains introduced on the Akita Mini-Shinkansen just a few years earlier.

At the same time, the 400 Series sets began to be repainted in a livery to match the newer E3-1000 Series sets: the blue hue silver livery was ditched in favour of a simpler two-tone grey livery divided by a bright green line. The first set to be repainted in the new livery was L4, on the 16th of December 1999, with the last being set L6, being repainted on the 16th of October 2001. At around the same time, the 200 Series sets were replaced on Yamabiko services, to wich the Tsubasa services ran coupled to, by the newerdouble-decker E4 Series.

After the extension to Shinjo, the service life of the 400 Series sets went along rather tranquil, with the trains shuttling back and forth between Tokyo and Yamagata prefecture.

However one issue soon caught up to them, a sort of “original sin”: the 400 Series, being designed to work in multiple with the older 200 Series, retained the latters’ maximium speed – 240Km/h – wich was now becoming an increasing impedment to JR East’s plan to raise the Tohoku Shinkansen’s maximium speed to 275Km/h and eventually to 300Km/h and above.

With the 400 Series also starting to show some signs of precocious ageing, JR East finally opted to prematurely retire the fleet, starting in 2008. Replaced on a set-by-set basis by twelve newly-built E3-2000 Series sets (derived from the existing E3-1000 Series but considerably upgraded), the first 400 Series sets began to be retired in 2009, with the former prototype set L1 leaving regular revenue services on the very first day of the year, the 1st of January, followed by set L2 on the 23rd of January, L9 on the 21st of February, L12 on the 19th of March, sets L8, L5 and L3 on the 3rd, 21st and 30th of April respectively, sets L7 and L6 on the 15th and 26th of May, L11 on the 19th of June, L10 on the 7th of August and L5on the 18th of September.

Only set L3 was left in service for a few months more, as a spare train. Finally, set L3 was officially retired as well on the 30th of April 2010, after it’s last two runs, both special farewell runs between Shinjo and Tokyo, on the 3rd and 18th of April 2010, thus closing, with the final arrival of Set L3 at Tokyo station at 12:48, a short but interesing career, lasting just a little more than 15 years.

All 400 Series cars were scrapped after retirement, with just one surviving into preservation: car 411-3 from set L3, initially stored by Fukushima Shinkansen Depot and later transferred in 2017 to JR East’s Saitama Railway Museum, where it sits on display to this day, alongside the E5 Series mock-up in the new annex building, repainte din it’s stylish and elegant original livery.

After all, depsite it’short operational history, the 400 Series is still historically relevant and important as the train that spearheaded the successful “Mini-Shinkansen” concept.

Trivia #1:

In the very early days of the Yamagata Shinkansen project, the Ministry of Finances, the government entity that in the end de-facto decided wich projects were to proceed and wich weren’t to, as they had authority over the national budget, remained skeptical, if not outright wary of the concept of extending the Shinkansen to Yamagata, wich they of course understood as needing it’s own entirely separated infrastructure. Funding was only allocated after Kano Michihiko, the then-chairman of the Diet’s transportation commission (and a Yamagata native) had to repeatedly go and explain to the ministry that it wasn’t about the construction of a new line, but rather (euphemistically) “the revitalization of the existing one”.

Trivia #2

The total cost of the Yamagata Shinkansen ended up being 63 bilion yen, of wich 37,5 bilion for ground and infrastructure-related work and 27,3 bilion for the 400 Series fleet.

Trivia #3

Mr. Suichiro Yamanouchi, the “father” of the mini-Shinkansen concept, would later actively participate in the development of the 209 Series, the new standard commuter train for Tokyo, and was the main driving force behind the overall “Shin-Keiretsu Densha” system, in particular the “Half the weight, half the cost, half the lifespan”, wich has been JR East’s basic founding philosophy regarding rolling stock design ever since.