Why isn't Japan rebuilding most of the rail lines through communities hit by the Tsunami?

Trains Magazine General Discussion
1

Just curious if anyone knows why. While I get that a lot of these towns were utterly wiped out, they are being rebuilt (in a few cases, to the extent that they are actually being raised on massive fill projects 30+ feet above their previous elevations) on a very comprehensive scale. While it may take some time, it seems pretty obvious that people will eventually return.

Moreover, just following a lot of these lines - most of which have either been outright abandoned or converted into busways - the amount of trackage affected by the waves is actually relatively minor (the cities along Honshu’s northeastern coast are mostly situated in low-lying inlets surrounded by highlands/low altitude mountains. The railroads that have closed largely ran up-elevation from the tsunami-stricken places [this is to say - these are not waterlevel routes]. This isn’t universally true, of course, but it wasn’t as if the rail lines were scoured clean, or something like that).

Plus, the busways still require the most expensive infrastructure - bridges and tunnels - to be rebuilt/maintained; just looking at satelite images, I can see that they really are just removing the tracks and paving over the ROW. So… that kind of keeps a lot of the costs locked-in.

I guess I’m just a little lost. Yes, I get that rail represents a more substantial investment, but considering just how railroad-fixated Japan generally is, this seems like an odd choice. Does anyone familiar with this know if there was any pushback, or were people just so numbed by the horror of it all that when the decision was made, nobody fought back?

2

Can you give me a name of a town in question, so I can look it up on Google maps for some context?

-Thanks

3

My understanding from watching the Japan Railway Journal on NTT was that a fairly large number of the light-railway services were unprofitable, being maintained the way interurbans would have been if ‘good roads’ hadn’t so broadly caught on in the United States. The moment you can combine the last-mile flexibility and alternative uses of a good interurban bus (as opposed to a more transit-centric one) with a dedicated ROW between conurbations… it’s about as obvious now as it was for the GM monocoque angle-drive diesels in the '50s…

… except now, hybrid-electric and intermittent plug-in wayside charging are now practical. So if actual point-to-point community transportation is involved, paving the ROW and using a bit of common-sense guideway enhancement ‘holds all the cards’ once you have the money to spend and the post-pandemic traffic warrants.

4

Shizugawa is one on the southern section that’s all abandoned. Another is Rikuzentakata. The lines run roughly parallel to Rt. E45 on Google Earth.