Tokyo, Japan's Bridges: Arakawa Railroad Bridges across the Arakawa

March 2012 (35.792 Degrees, 139.718 Degrees) Arakawa Railroad Bridges

I spent some time thinking about whether it would be better to go up or down the Arakawa River. The nice thing about going up a river is that you don't know how far you'll get (when you go down you know you'll end up at the river's mouth). Anyway, since we are turning around at the confliuence of the Sumida River we are still far from the source of the Arakawa which is at Mt. Kobushi 100 miles to the northwest. Perhaps one day I'll start at the source of the Arakawa and photograph all of it's bridges.

I sometimes call this the Arakawa River, even though that's like saying the Ara River River. The Japanese word kawa (or gawa) means river. One of the first kanji characters that I learned was river, which is just three vertical lines 川. The kanji word for Arakawa is 荒 川, but I'm not sure what Ara means. When I looked it up in Google, I just get a Japanese race car driver.

Anyway, this is a photo of the Arakawa I took from the confluence of the Sumida River. It shows three truss railroad bridges each carrying two railway lines. The tracks continue west across the Shingashi River (on short truss bridges) before going into Akebana Station. The total length of the bridges is about 685 m although the truss portion is 372 m. All three are Warren Truss Bridges with straight and rounded top chords. Note the big (uninterrupted) bike path along both sides of the river.

Tokyo, Japan's Bridges: Arakawa Railroad Bridges across the Arakawa by Mark Yashinsky is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.