It began, as most trips down YouTube rabbit holes do, with a tantalizing thumbnail in my feed. Some of my non-train-related leisure time these days is spent watching anime with my neighbor Steve, so a video with both a train and a blue-haired anime girl was all the clickbait I needed. YouTube knows what I like. I clicked through, and was treated to an engaging low-poly 3D animation of electrified helper-grade operation through Japan’s Usui Pass. This was unlike any Japanese railroading I had ever heard of. When I hear “Japan,” “mountains,” and “trains,” I think of Mount Fuji as a distant backdrop to a speeding Shinkansen, and…well, that’s about it. But a 6.67% grade? That can’t be right, can it?

I looked up Usui Pass on Wikipedia, and yes, that number is correct. (For those of you keeping score at home, that’s steeper than Saluda and Madison Hill, and just below the Uintah Railway’s steepest grade.) Don’t let the rainbow-haired anime girls fool you—this video displays a surprising degree of fidelity to prototype operating practice, right down to the pans dropping at the end of the day.

After I watched through to the end, YouTube naturally obliged my curiosity and presented me with more videos on Usui Pass operations. Most of them seem to date from 1997, in the final weeks before the new Nagano Shinkansen line replaced it. (The world over, there’s nothing like an impending abandonment to make railfans grab their cameras and flock to the scene.) All the videos show the same activity: pairs of EF63 electrics tying onto EMUs, shoving them northward up the mountain, and easing southbound trains back down again. There was enough traffic to keep several sets of EF63s busy. It’s an impressive sight to watch, even without English-language narration or subtitles.

The EF63s in particular are fascinating. There’s close to 7000 horsepower in a pair of those things; that’s like a 4-unit set of F7s, a pair of Virginian E33s, or a GG-1 and a half. Twenty-five were built and equipped specifically for this service, and rendered the previous rack-and-adhesion engines obsolete. Shoving trains up the mountain was their job, and theirs alone. Out of the 25, 10 have been preserved, and four of those are in operational condition. To me, that suggests a Big Boy level of admiration for these machines.

Amongst my N scale clubmates, there’s been a sharp uptick in Japanese train collecting lately. Perhaps anime has something to do with it. (It seems like every feature-length anime has a train scene in it somewhere.) After learning about Usui Pass, I find myself lusting for a pair of those EF63s (both Kato and Tomix have produced them in N scale), and maybe a 489 Series for them to push.

Image credit: @user-cl4jx4kz2b on YouTube