Seibu 4000 Series Bottle Opener: When people think of food items from the days of old-fashioned rail travel, “frozen mandarin oranges” and “tea in plastic containers” are often mentioned. However, in this day and age, neither of these items is something you can easily find in your everyday life anymore. Back in the day, plastic bottles didn’t exist. The beverage containers widely used at the time were glass bottles. While bottled beer is still common today, a much wider variety of beverages used to be sold in bottles back then. Upon checking, it seems there are still bottled soft drinks available through online retailers—it’s just that you rarely see them on the shelves at supermarkets or convenience stores. Now, if the cap were a screw-top, it would be simple, but usually, you need a bottle opener to open a bottled drink. However, when imagining a scenario where you might buy a bottled drink at a station kiosk, it’s unlikely anyone would go out of their way to carry a bottle opener with them on a trip. In fact, it used to be fairly common for old train cars to be equipped with bottle openers. Of course, this wasn’t the case for commuter or suburban trains, but they were standard features in passenger cars and sleeper cars on long-distance trains. That said, it wasn’t simply a matter of hanging a standard, commercially available bottle opener from a string… Instead, L-shaped metal brackets were attached to the walls or tables; by hooking the rim of the bottle onto these and “prying” it open, you could open the bottle. However, as mentioned earlier, with canned and PET-bottled beverages becoming the norm, bottle openers have fallen out of use. Consequently, while you won’t see new premium-class train cars being built with bottle openers these days, there are still a few cars in service that retain them. Among these, the 4000 Series electric trains used on the Seibu Chichibu Line (Hanno–Seibu Chichibu) are available for daily travel as regular scheduled services. A bottle opener is attached to the underside of the table in the box-seat section. However, since bottle openers were omitted from later-production cars, not all 4000 Series trains necessarily have one. In addition, it seems that bottle openers can still be found on trains that use vintage passenger cars, such as the “stove trains” operated by JR East, the Oigawa Railway, and the Tsugaru Railway. In a somewhat unexpected example, the Nagano Electric Railway’s 1000 Series also features a bottle opener attached to the side wall beneath the table when it is folded down. Looking back, in August 2010, the Hitachinaka Kaihin Railway held an event called “Time Slip: 3 Days of ‘Hot’ Midsummer Retro Train Service.” During this event, bottled beverages were sold on board. The aim was likely to encourage passengers to use the bottle openers since they were already installed in the cars.
Hard Tickets and Stamping: These days, when people say “ticket,” they’re almost always referring to the so-called “soft tickets” made of thin paper. However, in the past, the so-called “hard tickets,” made of thick paper, were the norm. Soft tickets issued by automatic ticket vending machines print details such as the date, station name, and fare each time a ticket is issued. With hard tickets, however, the tickets are prepared in advance with information like the station name already printed on them, and only the date is stamped before issuance. Another railway scene that has all but disappeared is “ticket punching.” This is the process where, upon entering through the ticket gate, a station attendant checks the ticket and makes a notch with a punch as a mark of validation. There were several different punch designs, and they were made to vary from station to station. Even today, there are still quite a few stations with staffed ticket gates, but most use a stamp (called a “ticketer”) instead of ticket punching, and the phrase “cutting the ticket with scissors” is becoming a thing of the past. So, does this mean that paper tickets and ticket punching are completely extinct? Not exactly—they still exist in certain places. One such place is the Sangi Railway Sangi Line (Kintetsu Tomita–Nishi-Fujiwara) in Mie Prefecture. While this line is famous for transporting freight such as cement, it might deserve to be better known for the fact that you can still experience hard tickets and ticket punching there today.
© Source travel watch