A selection of consists from this pack – from left to right: 1972-built sets in the original livery, full-production sets in the standard livery (1973 to 1989), full-production sets in the standard livery with Keio logos (1989 to 1992), full-production sets in the post-2002 livery, two five-door trains in the original and new liveries and the Kebajo Line 2-car “revival livery” set.
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(Consists are included! Don’t bother with placing individual cars!)
The 6000 Series was introduced in the early 1970s as the successor of Keio’s successful 5000 Series, wich had been built between 1963 and 1969.
The necessity of an entirely new design was due to several factors, primarily the rapid urbanization of the areas served by the Keio Line, with the Tama New Town project in full swing, meant that Keio’s trains were getting increasingly overcrowded. New rolling stock was also needed to cover the under-constructions extensions to the Sagamihara Line, to replace the increasingly inadequate pre-war and immediately-post-war built trains such as the 1700 Series and to provide new rolling stock for the planned trough-services between the Keio Line and the under-construction Toei Subway Shinjuku Line.
The latter became the basis of the new design, with Keio abandoning the 18m-long bodyshell with three doors to finally adopt the standard 20m-long bodyshell with four doors. Other design fetaures were requirement of the stringent subway regulations, wich mandated a front door to be used as an emergency exit and the exclusive usage of non-flammable materials.
Among other things, the 6000 Series was also Keio’s first train to adopt the iconic T-shaped master controller, wich had been introduced only a few years earlier by Tokyu railway.
The first six trains were delivered to Keio in 1972, having been built by Tokyu Car Co. (for the cab cars) and by Hitachi (for the intermediate cars). A peculiarity of these trains was that the cab cars had different air conditioning units from the intermediate cars – Tokyu had used four small conditioners, as was the praxis for the rolling stock built for it’s parent company, Tokyu Railway, instead of a single, centralized one as was on the Hitachi-built cars.
An additional batch of six six-car sets was delivered a year later in 1973 – depsite the similar looks, these actually differed slightly from the earlier batch in several ways: first of all, the air conditioners on the cab cars were standardized to the centralized unit of the intermediate cars, the livery was simplified (the dark red band being no longer pointy towards the central door, but keeping instead the same height) and the traction control system was changed from the camshaft resistor control derived from the earlier 5000 Series to an up-to-date shunt-chopper control.
In 1975 8-car 6000 Series sets were introduced for the first time, with 12 intermediate cars being delivered to lenghten the 1972-batch trains to eight cars.
This coincided with the start of 6000 Series assignments to Limited Express services on workdays – until then the 6000 Series had only been used on “normal” Express services, with Rapid and Local services being still exclusive assignments of the 5000 Series and previous “green trains” such as the 2000 Series.
This was due to the short lenght of many platforms of stations served only by Local trains, still designed for six-car trains of 18m-long cars, hence the 6000 Series, with it’s 20m-long bodyshell couldn’t fit in most platforms.
This was solved in 1976, with the introduction of 5-car and 3-car sets, wich were to act as stop-gap local trains until all platforms could be lenghtened (a 5-car train with 20m-long cars needs roughly the same platform space as a 6-car train with 18m-long cars). The 5-car sets operated on local services, but could be coupled to the 3-car sets to form an 8-car set for Express and Limited Express services.
A few years later, with the impending completion of the Toei Shinjuku Line and the start of trough-services with the Keio Line (via the aptly-named, newly-built Keio New Line), a new batch of fourteen 8-car sets, officially known with the seldom-used name of “6030 Series” were delivered to Keio between late 1978 and mid-1979. These were designed entirely around subway trough-services and as such fetaured some adaptations and modifications, such as being fitted with the Shinjuku Line’s ATC system and a new “ground-to-train” radio.
Reciprocal trough-services with the Toei Shinjuku Line finally commenced in March 1980, with Keio 6000 Series trains now running beyond Shinjuku, altough initially only as far as Iwamotocho, as the platforms east of it were long enough only to accomodate 6-car trains (wich was then the standard lenght of Shinjuku Line trains). Shortly after, with the further eastwards extensions of the Shinjuku Line, the platforms were likewise lenghtened, allowing Keio trains to finally run the whole of the Shinjuku Line, from the namesake Shinjuku all the way to the eastern terminus of Motoyawata.
1981 saw the introduction of 2-car sets, these being designed to extend 8-car trains to 10-cars and 6-car trains to 8-cars during rush hours. A total of eighteen was built between 1981 and 1989, with seven of them being part of the 6030 Series and thus cleared for trough-services on the Shinjuku Line, and 11 being intended for the Keio network only.
Three additional 8-car sets were delivered between 1988 and 1990 to cover the last extensions of the Sagamihara Line, from Keio Tama-Center to Minami-Osawa and Hashimoto, opened in May 1988 and March 1990.
In 1989 the new “KEIO” company logo was introduced, being subsequently applied to the railway’s trains, with the 6000 Series being no exception – in this case, the new logos replaced the car numbers on the side, between the cab door and the first passenger door.
In 1991 the final, and most peculiar batch of the 6000 Series was introduced: four 5-car trains with five doors per side instead of the standard four were delivered to Keio railway between February and March 1991. These were intended to reduce congestion on the notoriously-saturated Keio line by speeding-up dwell time (boarding and alighting) on local services at stations that did not have passing loops. Starting from 1992, a front skirt was added to all trains.
By the late 1990s, a full 25 years after the introductions of the first trains, the 6000 Series fleet was formed of 304 cars, a huge number that dwarfed any previous series (double the number of it’s predecessor, the 5000 Series, at 155 cars built!) but divided into a mess of six different consist lenghts and several batch variations and differences. In 1998 the first withdrawals began, with non-standard formations being replaced by the new 8000 Series, retired and scrapped. These were followed by a general re-organization of the fleet aimed at ironing-out the last resistor-controlled cars still in the fleet. This re-organization was completed by the turn of the millennium, with about 30 cars scrapped, and the remaining others combined into a new 6-car formation. The electrical equipment salvaged from the scrapped 6000 Series cars was re-used in former Inoksashira Line 3000 Series trains withdrawn and bought second-hand by local railways, such as the Jomo Electric Railway, Matsumoto Electric Railway (Alpico Kotsu) and Gakunan Railway.
By that time, congestion issues on the Keio line had been mostly solved by the constant introduction of 10-car trains and at the same time, lenghtening of existing ones as well. Originally intended as a way to alleviate congestion, the four 5-door sets introduced a decade earlier were now becoming a burden, especially due to their limited seating capacity and rather dark interiors (the door pocket windows of the standard 6000 Series sets having had to be scrapped due to structural constraints).
Keio thus decided to convert the four trains back to the standard 4-door design. This conversion, carried out at Keio Railway’s workshops, involved cutting portions of the sides of the car bodies and re-arranging them, eventually mixing with scratch-built sections. This process, wich had to be done one side per time so as to prevent a dangerous deformation of the bodyhsell, was costly, time-consuming and had little sense on trains that, depsite being 10 years old, had a rather obsolete design, hence Keio cancelling the re-construction program after only completing two sets.
The two completed sets were returned to regular services on the Keio Line, interchangeably with the “standard” 6000 Series trains, while the two non-converted trains being re-formed into one six-car set and one 4-car set: the six-car set was returned as well on the Keio Line, operating mostly on local services sandwitched between a 2-car set and a 3-car set, while the remaining 4-car set was put in service on the Keio Dobutsuen Line, a short shuttle that branched off the Keio Line at Takahatafudo station and ran to the Tama Zoo, as with such a short line, a reduced number of seats was no longer a problem.
2002 saw another major modification, being the repainting of the whole fleet from the cream and dark red livery to Keio’s new fucsia and blue livery that had been introduced way back in 1993 by the 8000 Series.
The final modification came in 2005, with the replacement, on some sets of the square pantographs with more modern single-arm ones.
By the mid-2000s the 6000 Series, depsite still performing well it’s duties, was by a long margin obsolete and no longer-up to date, and as such a replacement was in order.
This replacement ultimately came with the 9000 Series, wich had been introduced by Keio in 2001 to increase the number of available trains and to reduce congestion on it’s lines. Until then, the 6000 Series had soldered on as it was Keio’s only trough-service-capable train (the newer 7000 and 8000 Serieses hadn’t been designed for trough-services and as such were limited to the Keio network only). This changed in 2005, with the introduction of the Shinjuku Line-compatible 9000 Series subseries, the so-called (and again, seldom used) 9030 Series.
The introduction of the new trains accellerated the replacement process for the 6000 Series, with the last trains being withdrawn from mainline services: trough-services with the Shinjuku Line operated with the 6000 Series came to an end in June 2009, and by April 2010 the series had been completely withdrawn from the Keio Line and Sagamihara Line as well.
The last general overhaul of a 6000 Series train came in November 2009, the set involved being set 6146 (formed of cars 6141-6866), wich had been placed in service on the short Kebajo Line, shuttling from Higashi-Fuchu station on the Keio Line to the Racecourse at Fuchu-Kebajo-Mae. During the overhaul, the set was repainted back to the original livery of the 6000 Series, as they had been introduced in 1972: cream with dark red lines.
The other surviving 6000 Series set was set 6722, the four-car five-door train that had been transferred to the Dobutsuen Line back in 2000.
The two sets however didn’t outlast by much their main-line counterparts: the Kebajo Line 2-car set being replaced by a 2-car 7000 Series in January 2011, with the Dobutsuen Line 5-door set following suit in March, thus ending a nearly 30-year long career.
Unfortunately, almost all 6000 Series cars have been scrapped, the only execeptions being DeHa 643 (ex. 6418, built August 1986), wich has been preserved and it’s now on display (painted in the 2002 fucsia and blue livery) at Keio’s own “Keio Rail Land” museum, and the cab end of car 6722, the Dobutusen Line set, wich has been converted into a simulator (playable by the visible pubblic) inside the same Keio Rail Land.
Trivia #1:
Original plans called for the red band of the livery to wrap around the cab window. This was soon discarded in favour of the simpler 5000 Series-derived design.
Trivia #2:
The passenger windows of the 6000 Series were designed to be as squared as possible so to maximise the window area, and thus letting the maximium amount possible of sunlight in.
Trivia #3:
The 6000 Series can be considered a “transitional” train of sorts, bridging the gap between the old 18m-long conventional steel bodyshells with three doors per side and the current standard (not only for Keio, but Japan-wide as well) of 20m-long stainless-steel bodyshells with four door.
Trivia #4:
With the introduction of 5-door trains, Keio Railway calculated that the average local service dwell time had been reduced from 62.5 to 54.5 seconds, only a 8-second difference, hence the quick abandonement of the 5-door design in favour of lenghtening all trains to 8 and 10-cars.
Trivia #5:
Keio 6000 Series trains are fetaured in two Studio Ghibli films, both set in Tama New Town, around the Keio Line. Pom Poko heavily fetaures 6000 Series trains, including a detailed front shot of car 6757 (the cab car of the 1st 1973-built set) on an express service bound for Keio Hachioji. On the other hand, while in Whispers of the heart a 5000 Series trains gets the center-stage in a key scene, there is still plenty of 6000 Series footage as well, including a good side-wiew of the cab end of a 2-car set running a local service.
Bonus Video #1 (from makkoi55‘s YouTube channel)
A Keio Line cab ride on a 6000 Series set, from Takao-Sanguchi to Shinjuku, in 1987, fetauring among other things the coupling procedure between two 6000 Series sets.
Bonus Video #2 (from Keio Railway’s official YouTube channel):
A demonstration of the 6000 Series simulator at Keio Rail Land, courtesy of an actual Keio driver.
