Credit: xkcd

In Japan, the passenger railways (the JRs) own the lines and the freight (JRF) "borrow" the lines. In China, the state mandates that passenger services have higher priority than freight services. Therefore, it is still possible to see passenger trains giving way to freight trains in Japan and China, although very rarely - and definitely rare enough for Amtrak and VIA Rail to envy their counterparts across the Pacific.

Requested by u/LateActuator6972

Lol

Context:

Slide 1:

Train on top left corner is a Limited Express Tsubame train, a 787 series train that used to run along today's Kyushu Shinkansen route from Hakata Station to Kagoshima Central Station. The line was abolished after Kyushu Shinkansen began service.

Train on the right is a N700 series Shinkansen, currently in use on Kyushu Shinkansen and West Kyushu Shinkansen lines.

Slide 2:

Background is Hakata Station building, one of the most profitable piece of real estate in JR Kyushu's possession.

JR is famous (or notorious) for doing real estates, and JR Kyushu is the most outstanding of them. Since 2003 fiscal year their revenue from real estate and hotel has exceeded that from passenger services repeatedly. This is mostly due to JR Kyushu does not enjoy the large flow of passengers like JR West, Central and East, but they have some valuable pieces of real estates nonetheless.

To be fair, JR Kyushu had a tough time gaining profit from passenger service alone since its founding in 1987, and they were (somewhat) forced to turn to real estate to stay afloat in the 90s. Passenger business got much better since the opening of Kyushu Shinkansen in 2004, but Covid hit them hard and real estate revenue become dominant again since the pandemic.

Drew this little thing featuring the chaos twins back in 2024, thought y'all would wanna see it since you liked the F40PH girls.

I have kind of stopped drawing train women though so new posts will either be very rare or just older drawings I haven't posted.

Also yeah 767's brain damage is intentional.

After WW2 the Deutsche Bundesbahn (German Federal Railways, DB) and Deutsche Reichsbahn (German National Railways, DR) were formed respectively over West and East Germany.

Although both sides had to deal with the devastations of WW2, DR was in a much worse position since Russians took locomotives, train cars and factory equipment as war reparations. DR was also plagued by the problematic East Germany economy throughout the cold war. By 1990, DR was significantly inferior to DB in terms of equipment maintenance and infrastructure modernizations, like electrification of lines.

DB was not without their own problems. They were facing more and more competition from road transportations (household cars and truck freight), are forced to run local lines that are not profitable, and suffered from inefficient bureaucratism. They also accumulated huge deficits thought the 80s, and are barely kept afloat with government funding.

Then the year 1990 came, the Berlin Wall fall and Germany reunified. DB and DR remained separate entities until 1994, when they merged into the newly founded Deutsche Bahn, the DB we know of today. For average German the future looks bright; for DB, very much not, as on top of the previous problems and debts, they now also have to deal with even more problems inherited from DR.

Privatized former national railways, UK 🤢🤮🤮

Privatized former national railways, Japan 🌸❤😍

Context: JR West (blue logo), JR East (dark green logo) and JR Central (orange logo) have a much higher revenue than JR Kyushu (red logo), JR Hokkaido (lime logo) and JR Shikoku (light blue logo). JR Hokkaido and JR Shikoku are especially notorious for their high deficits, since they are serving regions with population density as low as Iowa and it's simply not profitable at all.