Keisei Railway

Keisei has it’s origin in the Japanese “Electric Interurban Boom” at the turn of the 20th Century, a time when many small interurban companies sprung up all over Japan, with varying degrees of fortunes, but with a common trait, as most were planned and built to serve pilgrimage routes to major temples and shrines located on the outskirts of cities.

Keisei was no different, as it was intended to provide a fast and especially direct link from Tokyo to the Naritasan-Shinsoji shrine in Narita, some 50Km east of the city (the Sobu Railway had actually already reached Narita in 1897, but with a steam powered circuitous route from Chiba, but a sizeable demand was present for a direct link to Tokyo).

Officially, the company was founded on the 30th of June 1909 and after gathering all the necessary permits and capital, construction of it’s line began on the 9th of November 1911 with an initial section between Oshiage station in Tokyo and Ichikawa, a temporary station placed a little west of the current Edogawa station. Soon later, on the 27th of April 1927, Keisei acquired the Taishaku Jinja Railway, the current Katamachi Line, a handcar line (a “human-powerd” tramway) that served Shibamata-Taishakuten shrine.

The first section of Keisei’s actual railway network was inaugurated on the 3rd of November 1921, built to “heavy” interurban standards: double-tracking, 1372mm gauge and electrified at 1500v DC via catenary. At the same time, the Katamachi Line was also converted to the same interurban standards and re-opened on the 21st of October 1913.

Keisei Railway’s “Main Line” was then gradually extended eastwards, reaching Funabashi in December 1916, from wich a branch was added towards Chiba, the prefectural capital of the namesake prefecture (becoming today’s Chiba Line), gaining a sizeable chunk of ridership in the process, as the parallel JGR railway was much slower and more circuitous, and it’s terminal wasn’t as conveniently located as Keisei’s).

In 1925 construction works were started to bring Keisei’s Main Line to it’s original intended terminus, Narita, opening one year later on Christmas Eve 1926 to the temporary Narita-Hanasakicho Station. Original plans called for bringing the line right to the front of the temple by acquiring the Narita Electric Tramway, but due to opposition from shop owners of a centrally-located shopping district (that the railway was to pass trough), Keisei had to relent and settled for the current Keisei Narita terminus, wich opened on the 25th of April 1930.

On the “Tokyo-side” of affairs, while much development had sprung up around Keisei’s Oshiage terminus, the station was still rather inconvenient for people headed into central Tokyo, as they had to transfer to the slow and overcrowded Toden tramway network. The same problem was also faced by Tobu, wich also had it’s terminus at Oshiage, with both companies planning to reach the popular Asakusa area, on the other side of the Sumida river. As soon as Tobu revelaed it’s plans to build it’s current Asakusa terminus, Keisei did likewise applying six times for construction permissions for a terminus on the other side of Asakusa, starting in 1923, essentially on the same exact alignment as Tobu, making this a battle on who of the two could get approval to construct it’s terminus in the only place available. In 1928, with the battle still ongoing, investigations uncovered that Keisei had been bribing off much of Tokyo City Council representatives, as well as some Diet politician and other administrators in charge of the approval process, for a total of 160’000 Yen in bribes (three million yen in current values, about 19’000€ or 21’100 USD) in order to sway political power in it’s favour and have the permit awarded to itself, rather than Tobu. Several arrests were made (including much of Keisei Railway’s administrators, the president and general manager), but the permit was nonetheless awarded in 1931, however, that same year Tobu had inaugurated it’s own Asakusa terminus, forcing Keisei to abandon it’s plans.

Instead, Keisei opted to acquire the permits from the Tsukuba Electric Rapid Railway, a company formed in 1928 to connect Tokyo (from Nippori station) to mount Tsukuba, had acquired all necessary licenses and construction permits, but didn’t have enough capital to actually build the railway. Following the alignment acquired by Tsukuba Electric Rapid Railway, the new line, branching off at Aoto station, was opened in December 1931 to Nippori, and two years later, in 1933, the line was extended southwards to Ueno Park, with an underground alignment and terminus (the first for a Japanese private railway), the current Keisei-Ueno station. As part of this, the whole network was restructured, with the “Main Line” now becoming Keisei Ueno to Narita, and the Oshiage to Aoto section becoming the “Oshiage Line”.

Also in the 1930s, Keisei Railway started to diversify it’s businness areas, adding light and electric power generation, bus transport as well as land development (plus the Yatsu Amusement Park) to it’s “core” railway sector.

During the war, as with all other major railway companies, many changes were mandated by order of the imperial government: the light and electric power generation sector was trasferred to Kanto Electric Distribution Co. (the predecessor of today’s TEPCO), and Keisei Railway was designated as the “integrated” operator for railways south of the Joban Line, with the Narita Railway (Narita City’s tramway company, the current Chiba Kotsu), Kominato Railway and Kujukuri Railway (a small 762mm narrow-gauge that was closed in 1961, with the company still existing under the same name as a bus operator) being merged into the Keisei Group.

As part of this same principle of wartime re-organisations, Keisei’s main competitor, Tobu Railway was instead designated as the “integrated” operator north of the Joban Line, thus acquiring the Sobu Railway (the current Tobu Urban Park Line, including the section between Funabashi and Kashiwa geographically south of the Joban Line), a company on wich Keisei had long set it’s sights on as a possible acquisition.

In the latter years of the war, Keisei’s underground Ueno terminus was requisitioned by the government, who intended to convert it to a munitions factory, and as part of the plan, the tracks were adapted to double-gauge, in order to recieve JGR’s 1067mm-gauge freight trains. However, the war ended before the station could be fully put to it’s military use, and all the equipment was later dismantled, with Ueno station being restored for it’s peaceful purpose. Gradually, in the post-war years, the whole Keisei network was also repaired and restored to it’s proper pre-war state.

In 1946, with the old Sobu Railway now firmly in the hands of Tobu Railway, Keisei instead opted to acquire the “training line” of the disbanded Imperial Army Railway Regiment, wich had a roughly parallel alignment from Matsudo to Tsudanuma (where Keisei’s Main Line and Chiba Line branched off to their respective destinations). Bought essentially for scrap value from the GHQ (the General Headquarters of the Allied Occupation Forces in Japan), Keisei Railway set up a dedicated subsidiary company, “Shin-Keisei Railway” to (re-)build and operate the line directly.

Also in the post-war years, many companies started to apply for construction permits in order to extend even further into central Tokyo, with Keisei doing likewise and applying in 1950 for a construction permit from Oshiage to Yurakucho, however, this wasn’t granted, with Tokyo Metropolitan Government’s official policy since 1957 being that construction within Tokyo would be dealt by the government itself in the form of subway lines, to wich all electric interurban railways should connect to.

As part of this plan, Keisei was to be joined to the Keikyu network (running from Shinagawa to Yokohama and branching outwards on the Miura peninsula) via “Line No.1”, wich after some bickering between the Tokyo Metropolitan Government (responsible for planning) and TRTA (the National Government-owned company responsible for building and operating) as well as the national government itself (responsible for financing most of the construction cost), was to be built and operated directly by the Metropolitan Government as the “Toei Subway”.

However, Keikyu’s network was in 1435mm standard gauge, so one of the two had to be re-gauged, either Keikyu’s to 1372mm or Keisei’s to 1435mm. After several tri-partite discussions between Keikyu, Toei and Keisei, it was finally decided to adpot Keikyu’s 1435mm standard gauge, one of the main reasons behind it being that as Keisei’s network was comparatively much less busy than Keikyu’s, regaugement could have been done quite easily in phases, depsite the longer network lenght.

With the Metropolitan Government granting sizeable subsidies, Keisei’s whole network and rolling stock was re-gauged to 1435mm in just 50 days, from the night of the 9th of October to to the morning of the 1st of December 1959, with the network being split into 13 sections, all regauged continuously one after the other. At the same time, works started on the reconstruction of Keisei-Oshiage station, wich was relocated underground, in preparation for the start of trough-services, and re-opened on the 30th of November 1960.

Three days later, on the 1st of December, the first section of Toei’s “Line No.1” opened from Oshiage to Asakusabashi, marking the start of the first ever railway-to-subway trough-service in Japan.

Thruought the early 1970s, the company embarked on a spree of investments, including setting up subsidiary companies to serve various “New Town” developments within Chiba Prefecture, such as Hokuso Railway, Chiba Rapid Railway and Toyo Rapid Railway, acquiring the Kashima Railway and the Kanto Railway, buying up shares of the Nambu Jukan Railway and Choshi Railway, as well as countless small bus operators; setting up department stores and land development companies acquiring land not only around Keisei lines or in the Tokyo area, but also far out in northern Tohoku and even Hokkaido.

Keisei also essentially expected to have struck gold in the late 1960s, as both the National and Tokyo Metropolitan Governments announced plans to build a new airport for Tokyo in Narita, to supplement and mostly replace the undersized Haneda. The “New Tokyo International Airport”, Narita Airport as it’s commonly known today, was to be essentially Japan’s gateway airport for the whole world and vice-versa, and was planned to be built on government-owned land less than 10Km east of Keisei’s Narita terminus. As such, Keisei immediately applied construction permits, but these were put on hold by the government, as it was planning to build it’s own “Airport Express” service in the form of the Narita Shinkansen, based on the brand-new Shinkansen technology.

Permission was granted when Keisei switched to a site 200m south of the planned Narita Shinkasnen station (wich was located right in front of the terminal building), building the current Higashi-Narita station, wich opened in 1978, serving as a station not only for airport express services (operated by the brand new, aptly named “AE Series” – “AE” standing of course for “Airport Express”) but also many local services as well, serving airport workers and other commuters.

However, the 1973 oil crisis hit Keisei right in the middle of this investment spree, sending the company in a financial crisis (cumulating in 1977 with a stop to dividend payments), leading to a 28 billion yen decifit by 1983. After an aggressive re-structuration process, wich saw among other thing, a 25% reduction in personnel, the liquidation of all non-core and non-profitable businnesses (such as department stores and most of the owned land), by 1989 the company was restored to financial stability, also thanks to the huge revenues by Disneyland Tokyo, whose main promoter (and ower of the land on wich it was built) being Keisei railway itself.

To solve the issue of accessing Narita Airport, after the failure of the Narita Shinkansen plan, in 1988 Keisei railway, togheter with the newly-privatized JR East, was invited by Ishihara Shintaro, the long-time Governor of Tokyo (but at the time Minister of Transport for the Takeshita Cabinet) to use jointly the completed, but never used Narita Shinkansen station shell right in front of the airport terminal. As part of this, both Keisei and JR East built links from their own lines, with both starting to use the new station on the same day, 19th of March 1991, with competing services: JR East’s brand-new Narita Express, and Keisei Railway’s Skyliner (Skyliner as a name had already been used by Keisei on Airport Express services to and from Higashi-Narita station since 1978).

As a continuation of this, in the early 2000s Keisei also fully acquired the rest of the unbuilt Narita Shinkansen alignment, wich ran along the Hokuso Railway, one of Keisei’s subsidiaries. As part of this, new trackage was built from Imba-Nihon-Idai (the end of the Hokuso Line, wich was to be the terminus for all non-Airport Express trains) to Narita Airport using the Narita Shinkansen’s alignment. The new line, the “Narita Sky Access Line”, was finally opened in 2010, bringing the travel time of Skyliner services from Keisei Ueno to Narita Airport (and vice-versa) down by a third, to 36 minutes by taking full advantage of the high-speed alignment of the line, running at 160Km/h (making it Japan’s fastest non-Shinkansen trains) using the specially-designed “AE” Series.

As of today, Keisei’s network is 152,8Km-long and it’s formed of seven official lines: the “Main Line” from Keisei Ueno to Narita Airport Terminal 1, the “Oshiage Line” from Oshiage to Aoto (junction with the Main Line to Keisei-Ueno), the Chiba Line from Keisei-Tsudanuma to Chiba-Chuo, the Kanamachi Line from Keisei Takasago to Keisei-Kanamachi, the Chihara Line (originally opened by the Chiba Rapid Railway in 1992 and sold to Keisei in 1998 after the former went bankrupt) from Chiba-Chuo to Chiharadai and the “Higashi-Narita Line” the official name for the Keisei-Narita to Higashi-Narita tracakge (mostly shared with the Main Line).

In terms of services however the picture is much more intricated: in general, Keikyu trough-services into and out the Toei Asakusa Line run to Narita Airport Terminal 1 either via the “Main Line” (most local and rapid services) or the “Narita Sky Access Line” (dedicated airport rapid services), to Imba Nihon-Idai via the Hokuso Line or to Shibayama-Chiyoda via the Higashi-Narita Line and Shibayama Railway. (Also worth nothing that some Keisei trough-services into the Asakusa Line run to Nishi-Magome rather than onto the Keikyu network due to capacity limits). Services out of Keisei Ueno (besides the Skyliner, wich runs straight to Narita Airport via the Narita Sky Access Line) run either to Narita Airport, via the Main Line, or onto the Chiba Line to Chiba-Chuo. Some local services also run only between Keisei Ueno and Aoto station, to add some capacity. The Chihara Line, wich is essentially a southwards extension of the Chiba Line also sees local-trough services with the latter, altough most services are self-contained. Shin-Keisei railway also runs trough-services on the Chiba Line from Tsudanuma to Chiba-Chuo.

The only properly “self-contained” line is the Kanamachi Line, wich runs essentially as a shuttle (using 4-car trains) between Keisei-Takasago (the connection with the rest of the network) and Keisei-Kanamachi.

In borader terms, Keisei Railway is the core company of the Keisei Group, one of the most intricated private railway groups in Japan, wich includes an impressive number of subsidiary railways (probably the highest such count): Shin-Keisei Railway, Chiba New Town Railway, Hokuso Railway, Kominato Railway, Maihama Resort Line (wich operates the Disneyland Monorail), the Mount Tsukuba Funicular and the Mount Nokogiri cable car. Other subsidiaries are also the Kahashima Railway (wich used to run the namesake railway until 2007, when it was closed, nowdays it runs bus services) and “Oriental Land Company” (wich owns Tokyo Disneyland and all related facilities such as hotels). Two more railways are also “related” to the Keisei group, but are not part of it: Toyo Rapid Railway and Shibayama Railway.

Trivia #1

Keisei Electric Railway had suffered in it’s very early day from the economic downturun following the Russo-Japanese war, wich albeit victorious for Japan, left the country in relative financial woes. This was especially a problem for Keisei’s initial stock sales.

Trivia #2

Among other non-railway-related, short-lived businness ventures in the 1930s, Keisei also directly built and owned an abbatoir-sausage factory in Makuhari (with products branded as “Keisei Ham” and “Keisei Sausages”) as well as manufacturer of medications such as poultices (branded as “Keisei Simitol”).

Triva #3

Another proposal for a “reciprocal” trough-service was to connect Keisei Railway to the Keio Railway, as the two were at the time the only companies still running on 1372mm “scotch-gauge” networks via the early plans for Line No.10 (the current Toei Shinjuku Line, wich opened in 1978).

This was soon cancelled in favour of Line No.1 (the current Toei Asakusa Line) as it was deemed too costly, too time-consuming to be implemented and generally undesirable (as the Keisei network would’ve connected to the subway in Ichikawa, way out in the outskirts. Connecting with Line No.1 at Asakusa was simply the best option, even if it mandated a regaugement.

Narita Sky Access route

Services to and from Narita Airport via the Narita Airport Line, Hokuso Line and Keisei Main Line