Sorry if I’m venting, but this also really puzzles me.
Tokyo is so super clean (except maybe Shibuya), and the railways and metro are very neatly maintained. However, taking the Tozai line is a bit… different. The trains are clean on the inside and quite OK on the outside, the walked parts of the platforms too, but the tubes… those are just nasty, soot hangs on every possible surface, one station got recently re-done, and I could already see the black streaks emanating on some tiles.
What’s up with that? Is it because half the line is in Eastern Tokyo? Did they use to run coal-fired steam locomotives there before? How come, really?
5 comments
Its old.
Same with some of keio line. JR have pretty much renovated most of their stations in the past 20 years. That comes along with modern planning and cable management etc.
However if you see a lot of local stations many people dont stop at plenty are still quite old.
Most of the dirty ones were just built a long toke ago with different planning and may be awaiting larger scale replacement so aren’t being given little touch ups.
>Tokyo is so super clean
I guess you’ve pretty much just stayed in the popular, foreigner friendly parts of Tokyo then.
Shibuya is clean, Shinjuku is the dumpster of Tokyo
I used to live on the Tozai Line, so I get what you’re saying.
Part of the explanation might be the fact that a large portion of the line is above ground, so the trains are probably drawing larger amounts of dust into the tunnels than on many other lines. The open air stations on the line never seemed particularly dirty by comparison, which might add weight to that idea.
What other lines do you take? Ginza, Hibiya, and Marunouchi are just as old and just as shitty.