Towns born on former rail yard sites, seen in aerial photographs

Published: August 11, 2026 / About 16 min read

There was a time when, right outside a station, there was a long, narrow piece of land filled with nothing but dozens of tracks. It was a rail yard for sorting freight cars by destination. If you open the aerial photographs, a spindle-shaped band, thin at both ends and widest in the middle, lies in the very middle of the town. These bands disappeared all at once after a certain period. The things built on the sites vary: skyscraper blocks, hospitals and research institutions, a ballpark, a museum, and parks. This article traces why blanks of the same shape came to different endings.

Land people could not enter, spreading right beside the station

A rail yard is a facility for taking apart freight trains gathered from various places, regrouping the freight cars one by one by destination, and sending them out again. Its purpose differs from that of a station where people get on and off, so it needs neither passenger flows nor shops. All that is required is the width to line up dozens of tracks side by side and the depth to push in whole trains as they are. As a result, blanks that people could not enter, of considerable size, were created close to the centers of towns.

These blanks are subjects whose whole picture can be grasped only in aerial photographs. In the photograph from around 1936-42 of Kento (Former Suita Rail Yard), the inside of the band is densely covered with railcars, and from a distance it looks only like a spindle shape painted black. In 1945-50 the same band changes to a bright, hard tone and becomes a surface where you can read each track. The operating state, with few railcars held there, is recorded as it is in the light and dark of the photograph.

The 1945-50 photograph of Saitama-Shintoshin is more straightforward. A bundle of tracks runs vertically from the top edge of the frame to the bottom edge, spreading like a fan in the middle and converging again. The area outside the band is almost all grid farmland, and the settlements only continue thinly along the roads. There is no room to wonder which is primary and which is secondary. The town name came to this land only after the band disappeared.

The conditions: flat / straight / long

The places where rail yards were set share conditions: the ground has no ups and downs, the alignment is straight, and the land is long. If the tracks curve, you cannot see from one end to the other. If there is a slope, you cannot hold the railcars left standing. The work of sorting itself made very many demands on the terrain.

The strictness of those demands remains in the elevation records. At Kita-Nagase (Former Okayama Rail Yard), the values that can be picked up scatter only between 0.7 m and 2.7 m, and the difference between the extremes is only 2 m. At Kento, too, it is 6.3 m to 9.9 m, a difference of 3.6 m. Saitama-Shintoshin is 11.2 m to 14 m, and Asuto Nagamachi is 10.4 m to 12.0 m, where the difference stays within 1.6 m. If you open the cross-section graphs, every location shows only an almost straight horizontal line, with neither hills nor valleys. You could also say that only land with faint traces of terrain imposing a shape on the town was chosen.

The other condition is length. The band of Higashi-Shizuoka (Former Shizuoka Rail Yard) stretches long and narrow from east to west, and this land was required to have length rather than area. Kento was midway along the trunk line linking Osaka and Kyoto, and Kita-Nagase was a relay point for east-west transport through the Sanyo region; both were points of passage, not destinations within the cities. The character of the starting point, land secured for passing through, long went on to influence how the sites were used.

Asuto Nagamachi alone is a little different: it is land where rows of houses had stretched as a post town along a highway. Because the highway and the tracks both run north-south and overlap, in the 1961-69 photograph the stripes of the sidings run through two-thirds of the frame from top to bottom, in a composition where a band of nothing but tracks lies in the middle of the town. It is an example where the band did not take land that avoided the town but cut in so as to run parallel with it.

1984: the end of the work of sorting freight cars

The system of relaying freight by sorting freight cars one by one was changed nationwide in 1984. Once the work of regrouping by destination was no longer needed, the surfaces for it were not needed either. Long, narrow land secured only for lining up dozens of tracks was left inside the towns, having lost its role.

The land left behind combined qualities rare in urban redevelopment: attached directly to a station / a single owner / flat ground with simple boundaries. When Japanese National Railways was divided and privatized in 1987, the party deciding the use changed, and the ways of reaching an answer diverged from place to place.

That said, the change of role and the change in the look of the ground did not proceed at the same speed. The 1984-86 photograph of Kento still shows the band, now rust-colored stripes, just as it was. For several years after the system was revised, the ground still wore the face of a rail yard. Thanks to this time lag, some locations let you witness, as you step through the photographs, the subtle stages before and after the tracks were removed.

The few years when only the outline remained

The most rewarding part of a site's story is not the finished town but the blank between the removal of the tracks and the building of the next thing. Few examples of this state remain in photographs. It is recorded only at locations where the era of photography happened to mesh with the year the tracks were removed.

The 1987-90 photograph of Saitama-Shintoshin is one of these rare examples. Up to the previous era, rows of railcars were packed densely in a reddish-brown band, but in this photograph the bundle of tracks is nowhere to be seen. The outer shape of the land division is kept while only its contents have become grayish-brown vacant land, and if you look closely you can read faint streaks of the vanished sidings. It was not yet decided what would be placed here, and the state of the few years when only the outline remains happened to be captured just as it was. The 1984-86 photograph just before it shows a composition with old and new bands side by side: a new white band of pavement emerges on the western edge of the band while the rail yard is still in use and reddish-brown.

On the other hand, some locations have no blank stage. At Kita-Nagase, 1979-83 is the last past era: the record breaks off with the yard rust-colored and at its fattest, and the next is today's photograph. At Higashi-Shizuoka, too, 1979-83 is followed by 1987-90, and the years of transition fall into the gap between photographs. That 1987-90 photograph, however, shows the traces of the removed tracks and cleared land, and you can read that its long, narrow shape kept the next use from being decided quickly. At Asuto Nagamachi, the brown winter frame of 1984-86 is mixed with bright lots where the lines have disappeared, only on the northern side of the band. The way removal advanced from parts rather than all at once coexists within one photograph.

What happens when a wide piece of land in a city center becomes vacant

At sites close to the centers of big cities, the answer was given in height. Umekita (Grand Front Osaka) is the site of the freight station at Umeda, and skyscraper blocks and a plaza opened there in 2013. Shiodome Sio-Site is the site of a freight station that stood east of Shimbashi, and skyscrapers for offices and homes were built there in a cluster. Takanawa Gateway City is the site of a rolling stock depot; Takanawa Gateway Station opened in 2020, and new blocks are being assembled around it. The three sites that answered with height share the condition that each is directly connected to a station in the city center.

Where the answer was height, the scale differs only inside the site. In today's photograph of Saitama-Shintoshin, low rows of houses continue densely outside the large arched roof shining white and the tall buildings, and the result of a single landowner planning a large area at once remains as the gap in building sizes.

Even at city center sites, however, height was not the only answer. At Umekoji (Kyoto Railway Museum), a park was opened on the long, narrow grounds, and a railway museum opened in 2016. The fan-shaped arrangement of the former railcars was turned into an exhibit shown just as it was. The location Around Mazda Stadium gained a ballpark on the site of a freight yard in 2009. With its seats and natural grass field, it is a building that uses up a flat, consolidated surface just as it is. At Sasashima Live, blocks of offices, a university, and commerce were assembled in the 2010s.

Two cases where medicine and a park became the core of the site

Let us look at two examples that used the site as a surface rather than in height. At Kento, a national medical research institution moved in in 2019, large, bright white buildings line up on the north side of the band, and the ground around them was finished with pavement and turf. A white-roofed walkway spans the band, and you can now walk back and forth between the north and south of the tracks.

At Kita-Nagase, a station was opened on the former track site in 2005, and people began coming and going at a place where trains had only passed through. Today's photograph shows a large building with a white round roof, a wide, flat sand-colored surface, and a curving walkway. The bundle of tracks remains only on the east side, narrowed in width.

These two examples share the idea of using up the site as a surface. Groups of hospital and research buildings and park plazas alike have aspects that work better when spread sideways than when stacked high. You can say that the rail yard's condition of flat, consolidated land became, just as it was, the condition for the next use. Asuto Nagamachi, which became large blocks and wide roads after land readjustment, also reached its answer in a way close to this line.

A shared starting point: flat lowland

The things built on the sites diverged, but the ground at the starting point is similar everywhere. Kita-Nagase is 0.7 m to 2.7 m, and Umekita has values of 0.7 m at the center and -0.2 m in the north. Shiodome, too, is 3.8 m at the center, and none of them differs much from sea level. Kento is 6.3 m to 9.9 m, Higashi-Shizuoka 9.4 m to 11.4 m, Asuto Nagamachi 10.4 m to 12.0 m, and Saitama-Shintoshin 11.2 m to 14 m; these sit somewhat higher, although they are lowland, but all are flat land where the difference between the extremes stays within a few meters.

Flat lowland is also connected with another property, how easily water collects. On land where the cross-section graph draws a straight horizontal line, you cannot read from the shape of the ground where water flows. For every location, the sure way is to check flood scenarios on the official hazard map that each city publishes.

Troughs drawn by land prices, and high values set anew

If you line up the records of observation points near the sites where official land prices (Chika Koji) can be picked up, a movement separate from the change of the sites comes into view. A preface is needed first. The observation points are residential land outside the sites, and their distances from the locations vary from 178 m to 819 m. They are not values for the sites themselves, and locations where only observation points more than 1 km away could be picked up were left out of the table because they are hard to use as a reference.

If you read with that in mind, you find two shapes common to many locations. One is a shape in which the final year is higher than the starting year. The observation point for Asuto Nagamachi is on residential land in Nagamachi 4-chome: against 135,000 yen per square meter in 1989, it is 269,000 yen in 2026, and within the range that can be traced up to the 2026 publication this end point is the highest value. Along the way, however, there was a year when it fell to 123,000 yen. At Kamiochiai 5-chome for Saitama-Shintoshin, too, it is 349,000 yen in the 2026 publication against 261,000 yen in 2000, with a trough of 253,000 yen in 2012-2013 along the way. Kita-Nagase Honmachi also has the shape in which the 2026 publication is higher than 2010, with a bottom in 2013 in between.

The other is a shape in which the starting year is higher. At Nakatsu 6-chome, where the observation point for Umekita is, it is 460,000 yen in the 2026 publication against 1,230,000 yen in 1989. Along the way there were a year of 1,670,000 yen and a year of 309,000 yen, and the range of the swings is in a different order of magnitude from the other locations. At Suzaku Shokai-cho for Umekoji, too, it is 360,000 yen in the 2026 publication against 379,000 yen in 1993, with a year of 213,000 yen along the way. A force separate from the story of what was built on the sites is at work in these records.

Pick up the turning points of the bands in the photographs

The viewer on a location page opens the 1961-69 photograph by default. This is often the era when the rail yard was at its busiest, so first try counting the parallel lines of the spindle shape here. Then if you step to the older side, at Kento you can compare in succession two faces of the same band: the pitch-black mass from around 1936-42 and the bright surface of 1945-50 where the lines can be read. If you step to the newer side, you can find for each location the era in which the rust-colored stripes appear for the last time.

If you move the "Then ⇔ now" slider, you can overlay directly what was built where the band vanished. The angle of the band is an interesting thing to find here. At Kita-Nagase the shape of the former track site remains in the park, and both the road tracing its edge and the boundary of the grounds run diagonally, never meshing with the surrounding land division aligned to a grid. At Kento, too, a narrow road tracing the edge of the band does not match the angle of the streets. This trace, in which the angle of the band remains in the town, is the kind that is hard to erase even when the buildings are replaced.

If you then open the cross-section graphs, you see that every location shows only an almost straight horizontal line. It is a natural result, since land with no quirks of terrain was chosen, but put the other way, it was not the terrain that decided the shape of these blocks. These locations share one feature: a single long band, drawn to follow the direction of the trunk line, goes on working as the framework of the town even after the tracks were removed. The sites came to hold hospitals, ballparks, and skyscrapers, but only the single line running diagonally remains the same way everywhere.

The prices in this article are actual examples at each point in time and do not reflect market prices after the article was written.