Sleeping in the midnight train

The Sunrise Izumo/Seto arrives at Okayama Station on platform 4 every night. It doesn’t actually say this anywhere public that I saw, although the station attendants certainly knew when I asked them, and the one in the booth had a chart he showed me as well.

There’s two different names for the train, the Sunrise Izumo and the Sunrise Seto, despite there only being one train every night that goes each way. The reason for this is that something special and unique happens at Okayama Station — west of Okayama, the train exists as two separate trains, 7 carriages long each, split between and going along two different train routes, whereas east of Okayama, they share the same line.

At Okayama, when heading west, the 14-carriage train is decoupled and split into two. When heading east, like I was, the two 7-carriage trains are connected together into a 14-carriage one. The front 7 going east (numbered 8-14) make up the Sunrise Seto, the back 7 (even though they’re numbered carriages 1 to 7) are the Sunrise Izumo. This was the third and final reason that I had picked Okayama to come to — I wanted to specifically take the Sunrise Izumo from this station and witness the joining of the trains.

I went up to the platform at around 9:30 pm to sit down on the waiting chairs, as I didn’t want to risk falling asleep in the lounge waiting room or something and missing my train. There were several people seated near me, and I assumed they were also waiting for the same train as me, but most of them left for a 10 pm train or so on Platform 3. Train stations in Japan don’t really operate after 1:00 am or so and before 4:30 am or so, but even by 10 pm the stations was pretty quiet, and many of the trains arriving at the station were accompanied by an announcement that the train was at the end of its route and people were not to board it.

Sometime around 10:00 pm or so, there was an announcement that the Sunrise Express (a name for the combined train) would be about 15 minutes late. Ooh, that was intriguing. It also started drizzling — I still had faced next to no rain at all on my entire trip thus far, and it was funny that it was now drizzling once I was in the safety of the train station.

The first half/front half of the train, the Sunrise Seto, arrived right on cue, at 10:30 pm. I took a picture of it coming in, then followed it to where it had stopped, to see a small crowd of people, about a dozen or so people, eagerly awaiting and filming the workers as they opened the back of the train and prepared it for the coupling process. It was also interesting how low the lower windows were compared to the platform, and how clearly I could see into the compartment if the blinds were not closed — this perspective is important to remember for later once I was in my own compartment.

i also noticed that there were a couple photographers on the opposite side of the platform, recording the train’s movements. They obviously weren’t even here to take the train, they were just fans of the train system in Japan who had travelled all the way here to catalog and archive this. And maybe they did this every night, or maybe I just happened to chance upon them doing this this one night.

Everyone waited around eagerly for the Sunrise Izumo to arrive. I idly wondered what would have happened if the Izumo were the one to arrive early, since it had to be coupled behind the other train. Would the train have had to idle along an earlier section of track in the middle of nowhere until the Seto passed it? Hmm. i remarked in my main Discord server that this was the one time in my life that I could say that half my train was late. This seemed to flummox an early morning Kynji.

Finally, at 10:50 pm, the Sunrise Izumo portion of the train rolled in. Everyone watched intently as the train was connected together. The one train worker in charge of it opened the front of the train, climbed up to the driver’s seat, and then guided the two halves near to each other, at which point they were joined together, with a tubular train section forming a walkway between the two halves.

It was super neat! I even noticed someone inside the train recording how the process looks like from inside (specifically, whoever was smart enough to book the back cabin of Carriage 7, which was the frontmost cabin of the Sunrise Izumo, right next to the part of the train that was being connected to the Seto, when the train was travelling east).

Once they were more or less joined together, I split from the group and went back toward the boarding point for Carriage 5, which was the only carriage for the nobinobi compartments on the Sunrise Izumo. The Seto had one carriage for this as well, in Carriage 12. The nobinobi compartments are the cheap (and free with JR Pass) tatami mat ones, basically economy class, and this page lists more detail on pretty much every aspect on how this train runs, from the layout to the price differential to what the JR Pass covers and does not cover. It also provides pictures, though my blog does as well.

This is what my compartment looked like:

And the view from the compartment itself looking out:

It was basically a capsule hotel room without walls, though there was a divider between compartments around the head area. There was basically no talking or interaction whatsoever between strangers, but some people obviously knew each other and whispered to each other now and then. While a little cramped, there was also nothing preventing people from leaving the compartment and walking around to stretch their legs. and being able to stretch my legs out to maximum length within the compartment made it a lot more bearable than it might seem from a glance.

The compartments came with a random and very pointless paper cup, and two pieces of cloth, one long one meant as a floor cover, and a short one meant for.. I guess to put over one’s eyes when sleeping or something. I’m not sure. But the compartments did not come with water, towels, pillows, toiletries of any kind, a blanket, or anything like that, so people had brought their own things to sleep on. The compartments also had no power sockets, although there was one in the corridor just outside my compartment. I saw someone else plug their phone into it and then take it out when done.

Out of the people trying to sleep around me, the person on my right was a guy, but the three people to my left as well as the person above me were all females, and I did note that a couple of the females came back from showers with their own toiletry sets. I was aware that the train didn’t provide a towel, and had only a limited number of shower cards that could be bought (for 300 yen, I believe), so I didn’t go for one of those cards since I did not have a towel myself.

This was also the first train thus far where the conductor actually came along, peered into my compartment, and asked to see my ticket. He took it and stamped it before returning it to me. In all my previous trips, the conductor had done seat checks while walking through the shikansen or limited express train I was on, but had not specifically asked to check anyone’s tickets.

Also, I had planned to use my bag or some of my clothes for my pillow, but what really worked for me in the end was the random sweater that I had bought in Kyoto on Day 21. It was a little bulky, but was light, and so made a nice pillow when I scrunched and fluffed it up.

I didn’t go to bed right away though. I spent the first hour and a half curled up by the window, propping myself against the two head frames and wedging myself parallel to the direction that the train was moving in. This picture is hard to make sense of, but it’s me leaning back against one compartment head barrier, and facing the other one across from me, with the window on my right.

I placed Tigey down on the window sill and the both of us watched the night scenery and the empty train stations speeding by. This part of the trip was awesome. I loved seeing the empty stations fly by, and imagined seeing dangerous zombies and mysterious youkai on the outside from the safety of my cabin as we flew by darkened countrysides and lonely towns and cities.

I believe these four pictures are from the vicinity of Kamigori Station, which we passed at 11:33 pm (so probably 15 minutes earlier than that on a normal night without delayed trains).

The compartment floor was rather uncomfortable, since it was solid carpet, and the train rocking gently didn’t really help either, but I did manage to fall asleep now and then, occasionally resurfacing to the land of the living to check where we were. We had three more stops after Okayama Station before the train moved into express mode, and the guy to my right left the train at some point around then, since he was not there when I woke up and strolled around the train the next morning before the first morning stop (Shizuoka Station). It was most likely Osaka Station between 12:30 am and 1:00 am, and I must have had dozed off by then because I don’t remember the stop and never heard/felt him leave. With the exception of the very last stop, Tokyo Station, there were no train announcements for stops or anything like that, the train would just pull to a stop, wait for a couple of minutes, and then start up along its way again.

We passed Maibara Station at 2:01 am, and that was a nostalgic blast from the past, since I had been there just five days earlier. We passed Hamamatsu Station at 4:00 am on the dot, that being the only station that the Sunrise Express going East to West stops at, but the one going West to East doesn’t stop at, according to the external link I added earlier. We passed Numazu Station at 5:29 am, Hiratsuka Station at 6:22 am, Chigasaki Station at 6:26 am, and finally arrived at Tokyo Station at 7:08 am, right on schedule. Somehow, somewhere along the way, the Sunrise Express train had made up all the 15 minutes that it was behind schedule for. Here’s us passing by Hiratsuka Station.

I left Tigey on the window sill all night, so he would have been both gazing out at the world and the stations even when I was asleep, as well as have been quite visible to anyone that happened to be looking at the train going by. I didn’t pack him up until we were approaching Tokyo Station. Although there probably wasn’t much action during the night, we definitely stopped at a couple of stations overnight before moving into express mode, and also passed by several stations with people on it in the morning and trains going in the opposite direction before Tokyo. We even passed some trains going in the same direction as we were, so Tigey had more time to stare at the people in the other train through the window. A man in a business suit waved at our train from his train at one point, but I was not quick enough to wave back before the moment was over.

Anyway, this was a very tiring experience, but a very interesting one as well. I probably never want to take the nobinobi compartment again though without specifically bringing gear to make it more comfortable. A compartment would have been better in theory, but I’m not really sure. The train was rocking way too much to use a laptop, I would have become sick from motion sickness really quickly, so the lack of a power plug wasn’t really a concern for me. Even just walking through all seven carriages, and then bringing my croquettes to the lounge area to consume them, gave me a headache from the rocking of the train, though I managed to get over it without incident.

Finally, here’s an unannotated gallery of pictures of the train that I took as I walked through it, after I woke up and before breakfast. I walked from Carriage 5 to 1, then back to 5, then the other way to 7, back to 3 to take pictures of the other washroom that I had missed, then back to 5 to get food, and then finally back to 3 to eat at the lounge there. At carriage 7, I looked at the connection to the other half of the train, but did not cross the train connector tube to get there.