With my family’s longstanding advocacy on behalf of Maryland’s prospective Purple Line, we check out light rail most anywhere we travel. An interesting thing about trams and streetcars, at least in cities that have had them for some time like Hiroshima, is that there is a huge variety vehicles in service. I’m sure there are multiple factors at work, but one big one is that many cities abandoned their surface rail networks in the latter half of the twentieth century. As a result of that, and the standardized gauge, many cars seem to have shuffled around the world to various cities and transit museums.
This is not to say that the city doesn’t have a range of shiny new cars. There were several varieties about, including an underground line I visited on our last day there, after finally going to the Peace Museum. The underground line thankfully had a machine to get a Paspy, the local smart card. As I believe I’ve earlier mentioned, the trick to getting these cards is to look for machines labeled IC, probably for intelligent chip or the like. The best strategy is typically to just find the card when arriving in the station, a task that has grown much easier than it once was. Just a few years back, finding cards normally involved hunting down an authorized retailer or one of a small number of valid distribution points. As you would expect, things vary greatly from city to city, but I think that smart chip cards have just gotten cheaper and more widely available, so distribution has gotten more convenient.
For me, the trams really epitomized the city’s charm and resilience. They were running again at an astonishing pace after t
he atomic bombing and even with a wide range of types of cars they manage to provide service with remarkable regularity. If you missed one, there always seemed to be a new car just down the line. The interiors were often crowded, but the riders were courteous and sometimes the cars themselves were full of whimsy such as the art contest winners depicted on the right. The friendly and welcoming nature ultimately comes from the city and its people; the infrastructure just reflects and reinforces it. But the enjoyment of the place’s vibe was common throughout the group. Francis was pleased to discover that one of Hiroshima’s sister cities was Montreal. I can see it.