Overview

The Keihan Main Line (KH) is Keihan Electric Railway's trunk route between Osaka and Kyoto — 40 stations and 49.3 km from Yodoyabashi, under Osaka's office district, to Sanjo. It opened in 1910 from Temmabashi to Gojo and has been the left-bank route ever since: it climbs the eastern side of the Yodo River while JR and Hankyu take the western one, which is why its Kyoto end lands among the temples rather than at Kyoto Station. Sanjo is a terminal on paper only — almost every train carries on over the Oto Line to Demachiyanagi.

Along the route

The Osaka end is underground: Yodoyabashi, Kitahama, Temmabashi where the Nakanoshima Line branches away, then Kyobashi. From there the line surfaces onto four tracks and threads the tightly packed local stops of Moriguchi and Kadoma — Noe, Sekime, Morishoji, Sembayashi, Takii, Doi, several of them barely 400 m apart. Past Neyagawashi it opens out along the river through Korien, Hirakata-shi and Kuzuha to Iwashimizu-hachimangu, with Yodo the stop for Kyoto Racecourse. Chushojima drops you in Fushimi's sake district, Tambabashi is the Kintetsu interchange, and then the run into Kyoto is a list of temple gates: Fushimi-inari, Tobakaido, Tofukuji, Shichijo, Kiyomizu-gojo, Gion-shijo. From Tofukuji it is underground, as it has been since 1987, when the last surface stretch along the Kamo River was buried.

Why play it

This line holds both ends of the register. Yodo, Doi and Noe are two kana each, among the shortest names in the game, while Ryukokudai-mae-fukakusa runs to thirteen and Iwashimizu-hachimangu to eleven — both of them 2019 renames, from plain Fukakusa and Yawatashi. In between sit readings that punish guessing: 樟葉 is Kuzuha, 中書島 is Chushojima, 藤森 is Fujinomori and not Fujimori, and Kyoto's 七条 is Shichijo, never Nanajo. The station signs add one more wrinkle — Keihan romanizes 千林 as Sembayashi and 天満橋 as Temmabashi, Hepburn's m before b, while the kana you actually type still read せんばやし and てんまばし.