:: A Local Line That Passes Through Kumamoto and Kagoshima
I found out about it while planning this trip. A line called the Hisatsu Orange Railway(肥薩おれんじ鉄道).
Good first impression, isn’t it? Orange just sounds nice.
The Hisatsu(肥薩) part comes from the first characters of Higo(肥後), the old name for Kumamoto(熊本), and Satsuma(薩摩), the old name for Kagoshima(鹿児島).
Because the line starts at Yatsushiro Station(八代駅) in Kumamoto and ends at Sendai Station(川内駅) in Kagoshima.
This stretch was originally part of the Kagoshima Main Line(鹿児島本線).
The Kagoshima Main Line ran all the way from Mojiko Station(門司港駅) in Kitakyushu(北九州) down to Kagoshima Station(鹿児島駅) in Kagoshima.
But when the Kyushu Shinkansen opened along that route, part of the line was transferred to the third sector, and that part is now the Hisatsu Orange Railway.
For reference, “third sector” originally meant the non-profit domain, as distinct from the first sector (state-run) and the second sector (private), but in Japan it has come to mean a company set up jointly by local government and private investors.
To put it more plainly, when the Shinkansen opened, the sections that didn’t make money were handed over to the local governments.
So in practice it ends up doing much the same job as the local lines(ローカル線) you see all over Japan. A train that stops at one small-town station after another and carries the people who live there.
Oh, the Kagoshima Main Line is still around, of course.
But this part is a little interesting too. It’s a single line by name, “Kagoshima Main Line,” and yet it’s split into a Mojiko–Yatsushiro section and a Sendai–Kagoshima section.
:: A Railway That Runs Along the Sea
Anyway, there were two reasons this Hisatsu Orange Railway caught my attention.
One was that it’s a train that runs along the sea.
Look at this stretch on a map and there’s a good amount of it that touches the water. Riding a train along the sea is a pretty nice thing, isn’t it? It’s one of the romantic ideas of train travel.
And sure enough, on the stretch from Akune Station(阪久根駅) to Sendai Station, I could keep watching a beautiful sea the whole way.
Thinking about it now, I could have gotten off partway and looked at the shore until the next train came. But hauling a big suitcase through the blazing midsummer sun, that thought never once crossed my mind.
:: Akune, the Ignition Point of This Trip
The other was that this train passes through Akune(阪久根).
Akune was the spark for this whole trip.
I watched some chef’s Kagoshima trip on YouTube. A scene where he bought sashimi from a small fish shop in Akune and ate it with shochu back at his lodging stuck with me, oddly. So I put a flag on that fish shop on the map. And I kept the name of that little harbor town in mind.
At first I was planning a trip to Aomori(青森) to get away from the heat, but that fell through for a few reasons, and while I was poking around the map wondering where to go instead, I came across that flag. The little fish shop in Akune.
Looking at the map to figure out how to get to this small harbor town, I found there was a train station. And a train with a cute name, the Hisatsu Orange Railway, was running to it. From there I could get to Izumi Station or Sendai Station.
And the deciding factor was that I could take an airport bus from Kagoshima Airport to Izumi. (Well, for what it’s worth, the same bus does go all the way to Akune.)
:: And So the Course of This Trip Was Completed
And this is the route that came out of it.
Airport bus from Kagoshima Airport to Izumi, then a train trip south on the Orange Railway from Izumi through Akune to Satsumasendai.
After that, take the Kagoshima Main Line into Kagoshima city, and since I already know that town well from several visits, it’ll be a trip of drinking shochu in earnest.
I quite like this route.
Riding a train along the sea, meeting new scenery. And at the end, a familiar city with food and drink I love. That was the plan.
And now the first half of the trip is done. The five days and four nights going around Izumi, Akune, and Satsumasendai on the Orange Railway.
What stayed with me most strongly from those days is exactly this: the scenery seen from the Hisatsu Orange Railway. Akune as a town has stayed with me deeply too, of course, but what stayed far stronger is the train and those views.
So I’m going back over this line in a post of its own. I want you to know how appealing a stretch the Hisatsu Orange Railway is.
