千里線

Overview

The Hankyu Senri Line (HK) is 13.6 km and 11 stations from Tenjimbashisuji 6-chome, underground in inner-city Osaka, to Kita-senri up on the Senri Hills — and it is the half of the Sakaisuji through service that the Kyoto Line's article only half explains. Osaka Metro's Sakaisuji Line ends at Tenjimbashisuji 6-chome; its trains carry straight on up this line, or turn east at Awaji onto the Kyoto Line. The line began poor. The North Osaka Electric Railway opened it from Juso to Toyotsu on 1 April 1921 with no money to bridge the Yodo, so it borrowed the abandoned alignment of the old Tokaido Main Line between today's Sozenji and Suita and tied into Hankyu's Juso instead, and it developed cemeteries along its route so energetically that locals called it 墓地電車, the graveyard train. Shin-Keihan took it over in 1923 and finally opened the river crossing to Awaji in 1925. It reached its present shape only in 1959, when the Tenjimbashi–Awaji section was moved out of the Kyoto Main Line and into this one, and its present length in 1967, when Senri New Town — Japan's first large-scale new town — pulled it north to Kita-senri, a station that opened with the first practical automatic ticket gates in the country.

Along the route

From Tenjimbashisuji 6-chome, an underground station Osaka Metro manages, the line crosses the Shin-Yodogawa to Kunijima, which sits so close to Sozenji on the Kyoto Main Line that only the Kunijima waterworks lies between them. At Awaji it crosses the Kyoto Main Line on the flat — two island platforms, four tracks shared by direction between the two lines, and a 50 km/h restriction through the whole thing. It is the acknowledged worst bottleneck in the Kyoto Line's timetable and the reason for the viaduct project now rebuilding the junction. North of Awaji the line runs up that old Tokaido trackbed past Shimo-shinjo and Hankyu's own Suita, a different station from JR's about 600 m away, then climbs the Senri hills. Kandai-mae was created in 1964 by merging two closed stations and sits directly under Kansai University, with escalators running from the platforms up to the campus. Then Senriyama, Minami-senri, Yamada — the newest station on the line, opened in 1973 a few hundred metres from where the temporary Expo '70 station had stood, and now the interchange with the Osaka Monorail — and Kita-senri. Almost nothing stays on the line: Hankyu runs it as three through patterns, and only a handful of early-morning and late-night trips are confined to it.

Why play it

柴島 is the trap and most of the reason to run this one. It reads くにじま — Kunijima — not しばじま or しばしま, and it is a textbook 難読駅; Hankyu's own site proves the reading three ways at once, in the page URL, the heading and the furigana. It is also the only station any train on the line passes without stopping, since the Sakaisuji Semi-Express runs through it. The other extreme is the first station: 天神橋筋六丁目 is fourteen kana and twenty-five keystrokes, the longest name on the line by a distance, and it carries the line's one romanisation quirk. Every printed sign uses Hepburn's m before b — Osaka Metro writes Tenjimbashisuji 6-chome, Hankyu Tenjimbashisuji-rokuchome — but the kana is てんじんばし, so what you actually type is tenjin…; and the numeral on the sign is spelled out as ろくちょうめ. Against that, 淡路 and 吹田 are five keystrokes each. The back half is a rhythm drill: せんり turns up in three station names in a row — 千里山, 南千里, 北千里 — and again in the name of the line itself, so once the fingers learn it they stop thinking. 下新庄 is the small one to watch, printed Shimo-shinjo but typed shimoshinjou.