East Japan Railway Co. (JR East) said Monday that the Tohoku Shinkansen Line, crippled since the March 11 Great East Japan Earthquake, will return to full service from late April.
East Japan Railway Co. (JR East) said Monday that the Tohoku Shinkansen Line, crippled since the March 11 Great East Japan Earthquake, will return to full service from late April.
JR East officials said lessons from the Great Hanshin Earthquake of 1995 as well as the Niigata Chuetsu Earthquake of 2004 are helping the company to restore services much more quickly than in the past.
The Tohoku Shinkansen Line has about 1,200 damaged sections, including cut overhead cables, leaning power poles and cracks in the elevated tracks, between an approximately 500-kilometer stretch between Omiya Station in Saitama Prefecture and Iwate-Numakunai Station in Iwate Prefecture.
Partial service has already resumed between Tokyo and Nasu-Shiobara stations as well as between Morioka and Shin-Aomori. However, repair work was necessary for the stretch between Nasu-Shiobara and Morioka.
JR East officials said service will be resumed between Morioka and Ichinoseki around April 8, while service between Nasu-Shiobara and Fukushima is scheduled to resume in mid-April.
The remaining stretch, from Ichinoseki to Fukushima, is set to resume in late April.
Service on the Yamagata Shinkansen between Fukushima and Shinjo stations will resume Thursday.
JR East officials also hope to resume service in stages on the Joban Line between Iwanuma and Tsuchiura stations by late April.
However, no timetable has been set for resuming operations between Iwaki and Watari stations because no study of damages has been possible due to the radiation scare at the quake-stricken Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant.
Past major earthquakes have shut down Shinkansen lines for much longer periods.
For example, the Great Hanshin Earthquake caused serious damage to the Sanyo Shinkansen Line with eight girders along the line collapsing and shear failure leading to the crumbling of steel-reinforced concrete elevated tracks and columns.
It took 81 days for full service to be restored to the Sanyo Shinkansen Line.
After the Niigata Chuetsu Earthquake, service on the Joetsu Shinkansen was not restored for 66 days because a bullet train derailed while it was traveling when the quake hit.
After the Hanshin earthquake, JR East began work to strengthen the columns of elevated Shinkansen tracks by wrapping steel sheets around them.
The pace of that reinforcement work picked up following the Niigata Chuetsu Earthquake and by fiscal 2007 work had been completed on all 18,500 or so columns.
Even though the Great East Japan Earthquake was much larger in magnitude, no bridges, elevated train tracks or tunnels along the Tohoku Shinkansen Line collapsed.
A JR East official said, "A major factor behind the early resumption of services was the fact that there was no fatal damage that would have required us to rebuild it from scratch."
There were also no fatalities on the Shinkansen line as a result of the March 11 earthquake.
Although 24 Tohoku Shinkansen runs were operating when the quake struck, they all stopped without a single derailment because a network of nine seismographs along the coast and 44 seismographs along the Shinkansen route detected the initial seismic movements and emergency brakes were applied.
After the Niigata Chuetsu Earthquake, JR East installed 28 new seismographs along the Tohoku Shinkansen route and improved its anti-quake system to reduce the time until emergency brakes were applied.
Of the 8,000 people working on repair lines for JR East, about 3,500 are working on restoring Shinkansen services.
A JR East official said, "After the Chuetsu earthquake, people in Niigata told us, 'Restoring Shinkansen services will bring brighter news to the quake-hit areas.' We want the restoration of full services on the Tohoku Shinkansen Line to contribute to rebuilding efforts."