I highly recommend the Meiji-Mura Museum in a suburb of Nagoya. Although billed as a “re-recreated village,” many of the 60+ buildings moved to the site are industrial in nature, including a complete railway shop building with some of its original tools. The beautiful site rivals most botanical gardens and I would estimate the entire project cost in the hundreds of millions of dollars. The Meiji period dates from Japan’s opening to the West and the buildings were picked for their Occidental architecture. These are fast disappearing and the effort to save them spared no expense. The museum has separate electric and steam train lines, both of which are very short by our standards. One locomotive and one tram operate throughout the day. A Baldwin stema locomotive chuffing over the brick arch bridge that looms over Frank Lloyd Wright’s Hotel Tokyo is a site not to be missed. The train and bus ride (get a joint ticket at Nagoya Station) takes about 45 minutes each way and plan to spent 3-5 hours. While in Nagoya, take a surprisingly slow ride on their new mag-lev subway line. If the World’s Fair is still on while you are in town, you can also go to the JR exhibit and walk through the mag-lev that recently set world speed records. The Railway Museum in Kyoto is a three-quarter roundhouse filled to the brim with JR steam locomotives. Again, the ride is very short and we never saw the tram line operate. The best part of the museum may be its location. Kyoto, of course is a fantastic place to experience Japanese culture and history. The site itself is very close to the Kyoto station – we walked it, but it’s a convoluted route , so hop into a cab. The museum is located inside a wye that links several heavily trafficked lines. I spent about two hours on site and there was never a time when at least one mainline train was not adjacent the grounds.

When I was in the Osaka area couple years ago, there where posters up in some of the JR train stations advertising the museum in Kyoto. Have no idea what any of the posters said (all in Japanese kanji), but pictures with several locomotives under steam said it all. Unfortunately, I didn't make it there on my trip, but if I happen to go back there, I would definitely go out of my way to get to Kyoto.