相鉄いずみ野線

Overview

The Sotetsu Izumino Line (SO) runs 11.3 km from Futamata-gawa to Shonandai in 8 stations. Unlike the Main Line it joins, it was a passenger railway from the first day: a new-town line through the hills of western Yokohama, planned together with the housing estates it serves. Sotetsu applied in 1967 for a licence to build all the way to Hiratsuka and received it in 1968. The first section, Futamata-gawa to Izumino, opened on 8 April 1976 — three years later than planned, and at roughly three times the budgeted cost after the oil shock.

The rest followed slowly. The line reached Izumi-chuo on 4 April 1990 and went underground into Shonandai on 10 March 1999, meeting Odakyu's Enoshima Line there; the Yokohama Municipal Subway's Blue Line arrived at the same station that August. The licence beyond Shonandai to Hiratsuka is still held, with no date for building it. Most trains carry on from Futamata-gawa over the Main Line towards Yokohama, and since 2023 some have run on via the Sotetsu Shin-yokohama Line onto Tokyu tracks. The line has not a single level crossing: cuttings, tunnels and viaducts carry it over and through the ridges instead.

Along the route

Leaving Futamata-gawa, the Izumino tracks climb at 35 per mille to cross over the westbound Main Line, then turn south, pass under the Tokaido Shinkansen and reach Minami-makigahara. No place in Yokohama is actually called Minami-makigahara — the station is in Kashiwa-cho and takes its name from the Makigahara district nearby, whose characters, "ten thousand horsemen", are said to recall the Hojo army that defeated Hatakeyama Shigetada there in 1205.

A tunnel built as a covered box, so that footpaths and utility pipes could run on top, leads to the viaduct and Ryokuen-toshi, "green garden city", a name coined for the new town; while the line was being planned the station was going to be called Koyasu, after the local district. Yayoidai sits in a cutting whose gentle slopes are planted with Somei-Yoshino cherries, a tunnel of blossom in spring. Izumino, the terminus for fourteen years, is in a cutting too.

Beyond Izumino the line runs on a long viaduct beside the Izumi River, with fields and woodland below and, on a clear day, the Tanzawa mountains, Hakone and Mount Fuji to the west. Izumi-chuo is an elevated station. The train crosses the Kanjo 4 ring road on a Nielsen-Lohse arch bridge into Yumegaoka, near the Blue Line's Shimoiida station, then descends at up to 33 per mille into the Shonandai tunnel. The tunnel has two levels, the subway on top and the Izumino Line below; Sotetsu took the lower one so that the line could one day continue west.

Why play it

Eight stations make a short run, so there is little time to recover from a slip — and the hardest name comes second. 南万騎が原 (みなみまきがはら) is 16 keystrokes, reads 万騎 as まき and puts a hiragana が between kanji. 緑園都市 starts on the digraph りょ. 弥生台 is やよいだい, where the い after よ is an easy letter to drop.

Then the line turns to hiragana. いずみ野 and いずみ中央 come back to back, so you type "izumi" twice; in Kanji mode the obvious conversion for いずみ is 泉 — the name of the ward the line runs through — so the trick is to leave いずみ alone and convert only 野 or 中央, where ちゅうおう hides two long vowels. ゆめが丘 writes が in hiragana, while the Main Line's 希望ケ丘 uses a katakana ケ and Odakyu's 桜ヶ丘 a small ヶ: three ways to write the same が丘 within about ten kilometres of each other. The run ends at 湘南台, しょうなんだい, on the ん-before-だ that a single n types cleanly.