Finding the stopping position target It would be easy to talk about if “all trains are 16-car trains and the position of the platform for entry and exit is the same for all” like on the Tokaido Shinkansen, but this is rather a rare case in Japan. There are many situations where short trains stop on long platforms. Since the 1980s, the JNR and JR groups have been “running short trains more frequently” instead of “running long trains occasionally,” and this has increased the number of situations where “short trains stop a little bit at a part of a long platform. This has led to the situation described at the beginning of this article. To avoid this situation, we only need a clue to know “where the train will stop. When a train enters a station, the position where it should stop is fixed, and it does not stop at will. Then, the solution is to know where the train should stop. The position is indicated by the “stop target,” or “stop mark” for short. The driver decelerates and stops the train in accordance with this stopping position target. There are three methods of installation: hanging from the platform roof, standing beside the track, and placing between the left and right rails. Since the train will never stop before the stop location target, finding the stop location target will tell the train where the next train will stop. If the train is positioned further back toward the direction of travel than that position, it will not be out of line. The only thing you need to know is the number of cars in the train. Since this information is only for the driver’s use, ordinary passengers would probably be confused if they were suddenly told “the stop position target. I guess that would be a bit too much. Let me first show you an actual example.
First, the most popular case is “each train car has a different stop target”. When the same targets are used regardless of the number of cars in a train, they are generally marked with a plain “◇” instead of a number. In addition, stop signs are not always placed according to the number of cars in a train. There are examples such as the following. In some cases, stop targets are set only for specific trains. In addition, there are also examples of stop targets for specific trains.
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