Upgrading Narrow Gauge Standards

When the railways were nationalized between 1906 and 1907, the skeleton of the nationwide trunk rail network was nearly completed, as mandated in the Railway Construction Act of 1892. At the end of 1907, nationalized railway lines in operation totalled 7,165 km. Construction continued and 2,677 km of line were added by the end of 1919. In addition to active line expansion, the first decade after the nationalization up to the 1910s was characterized by vigorous efforts to improve the quality of facilities. The nationalization of railways was accomplished by merging governmentowned railways and 17 private railways. The facilities and equipment varied widely in level of technology due to different histories of imports and management policy. Some large private railways had poor facilities and equipment. In some cases, different interconnected railways did not allow through operation of freight cars. Thus, technical unification was an important goal to complete the nationalization, and served as the basis of further improvement. Unification of standards and gauges was accomplished by incorporating the latest technologies. The process was concurrent with the industrial revolution in Japan, which occurred between the 1890s and the 1900s, followed by the burgeoning of the heavy and chemical industries in the 1910s. Rapid development of railway technology formed an integral part of the industrialization process and boosted transport capacity significantly. Government railways, a gigantic industrial customer, also had an engineering arm covering basic research and manufacturing, which led development of Japanese railway technology and modernization of the rail industry.