Chris Cooper and Kiyotaka Matsuda
Tokyo -
Katsumi Kishitani worked almost seven weeks straight helping East Japan Railway to repair its busiest bullet-train line after last month’s earthquake. The payoff comes today when services fully resume for the spring holidays.
Kishitani, a transport ministry rail director for the earthquake-hit area, has been working 16-hour days and sleeping in his office in Sendai in Miyagi prefecture.
JR East, as the railroad is known, deployed 8 500 engineers on its main Tohoku line to fix tracks, bridges and tunnels, said Satohiko Asakura, a company spokesman.
“I never imagined something this terrible would happen,” Kishitani said. “We were speechless.”
The massive earthquake damaged 1 200 places on the JR East line, including stations, bridges, tunnels and overheard wire. And an aftershock earlier this month damaged 550 more places. The world’s largest listed railway operator by sales is completing the repair work two weeks faster than in 2004, when a magnitude 6.6 quake derailed cars on the Joetsu high-speed line.
JR East initially said the aftershock could delay the resumption of service between Tokyo and Shin-Aomori, Japan’s northernmost high-speed train station, until next month, after the holidays.
“The accumulation of knowledge from those two earthquakes has paid off in the speed of our repairs,” Kishitani said.
The March 11 earthquake and tsunami contributed to the railroad’s biggest ever monthly drop in passenger revenue, it said on April 5.
The company, which is based in Tokyo, booked an extraordinary loss of ¥58.7 billion (R4.8bn) for the year ended March 31 to cover restoration expenses and recorded a ¥59bn drop in sales from the quake, it said on Wednesday.
The ¥117.7bn in costs and lost revenue from the March quake was almost double the ¥60.2bn the company recorded from the 2004 earthquake in Niigata, Toru Owada, the chief financial officer of the railroad, said yesterday.
“
It’s critical to get it up and running,” said Edwin Merner, the president of Atlantis Investment Research in Tokyo. “The bullet train is very important for business.”
The railroad carried 88 million passengers on its five bullet train, or Shinkansen, lines in the year ended March 31, 2010. That is larger than the combined populations of California and Texas.
By comparison, Amtrak, in Washington, said it carried 3.2 million passengers on its high-speed Acela Express train and 29 million across its US network in the year ended September 30.
JR East resumed partial service on the bullet-train line as repairs were completed. It re-opened service from Tokyo to Fukushima, where the disasters triggered the world’s worst nuclear accident since 1986, earlier this month and extended it to Sendai this week.
The final leg opening today will allow passengers to ride all 714km between Tokyo and Shin-Aomori, and access the Akita bullet-train line.
JR East also may have benefited from additional investments in safety. On March 11, a network of 97 earthquake detectors triggered an automatic shutdown of bullet trains about 15 seconds before the quake hit, Asakura said. Automatic brakes stopped the 27 trains operating with no fatalities. However, shares are down 23 percent since then. – Bloomberg