阪神なんば線

Overview

The Hanshin Namba Line (HS) is eleven stations and 10.1 km from Amagasaki to Osaka-namba, and it took eighty-five years to finish. It opened on 20 January 1924 as the Dempo Line, a stub from Daimotsu, and it was only ever meant to be the first instalment of something bigger: a second Hanshin trunk line that would leave the Main Line at Deiribashi and bypass it into the city. The Shōwa Depression killed that link, leaving a 未成線 that was never built. The stub was renamed the Nishi-Osaka Line in 1964 and pushed as far as Nishikujo, where it stopped. Work towards Kujo began in August 1967 and was abandoned the month after under local opposition, and there it sat for over three decades — a terminus deliberately built tall enough to bridge the JR lines in front of it, with the track simply ending short of them. Only in 2009 did the last 3.8 km open, joining Kintetsu at Namba and putting Kobe and Nara on a single ride. Ownership is still split down the middle: Hanshin owns the track as far as Nishikujo and merely operates over the newer section, which its builder calls the Nishi-Osaka Extension.

Along the route

Out of Amagasaki the line drops to grade, ducks under the Main Line's westbound track and climbs back onto viaduct on its south side to reach Daimotsu, where it swings east past the Tigers' farm ballpark, crosses two rivers and the Hanshin Expressway and arrives at Dekijima. It comes down to grade before Fuku — the first level crossing on the line — then lifts just enough to cross the Yodo on a bridge whose deck sits barely four metres above the water. That is low enough to matter: when the river rises or a typhoon is forecast, flood gates in the levee are closed and the whole line stops. Chidoribashi is elevated, and then Nishikujo, the terminus for forty-five years. Everything east of it is 2009 work, and it shows: a full-height noise hood encloses the trains completely for the residents of Kujo, then the line dives steeply into tunnel, which produces the rare inversion of an elevated subway — Osaka Metro's Chuo Line — running over an underground private railway. Dome-mae is the deepest station Hanshin has, about 30 m down with its platform on the fifth basement level. The numbering is worth a glance too: Amagasaki and Daimotsu keep their Main Line numbers, HS09 and HS08, and the rest of the line counts down from HS49 to HS41 at Osaka-namba.

Why play it

The trap is the second station. 大物 is だいもつ, not おおもの — ja.wikipedia files it as a 難読駅名 in so many words — and a player who guesses is stopped dead on the second keystroke. 伝法 is the romanisation trap instead of a reading one: the kana is でんぽう and types denpou, but Hanshin's sign reads Dempo, with Hepburn's m before p, and has only done so since 2009. ドーム前 is the interesting one. It is the line's only katakana name, and its long bar is not decoration — the ー is a keystroke, so the kana どーむまえ types as do-mumae with a literal hyphen in the middle, which is why the name needs the same exemption its Osaka Metro neighbour ドーム前千代崎 already carries. Elsewhere the line is gentle. 千鳥橋 is the longest at twelve keystrokes; 大阪難波 is the longest to read at seven kana, opening on a doubled お and closing with an ん that folds into the following ば, so both nba and nnba are accepted. And 福 is the shortest — ふく, four keystrokes, fu or hu — and the only single-kanji station name anywhere on the Hanshin network. A full run from terminal to terminal is 91 keystrokes, which makes this one of the quickest complete lines to clear.