At 10:41 p.m. on October 7, for the first time in a long time, there was a major earthquake in the Kanto region.
Normally I would be asleep at this time, but my wife is buying an IPhone 13 Pro, so I went to Apple's website to install apps for purchase and payment.
The shaking started just before the earthquake alert. I barely felt the vertical shaking, but it gradually became louder and louder.
Fortunately, nothing fell and the shaking stopped.
I felt about a 3 on the Richter scale, which I immediately checked on NHK TV.
The epicenter was in the northwestern part of Chiba Prefecture, with a magnitude of 6 on the Richter scale, and the depth of the epicenter was 80 kilometers, so I thought it was not a big earthquake and went to bed immediately.
However, a little after 1:30 in the morning, I heard a train running.
I thought it was strange that the train was running at this time, since the last train downstairs is at half past midnight, and when I checked, I found that trains in the Tokyo metropolitan area had stopped running due to the earthquake.
Some private railways and subways resumed operations quickly, but JR lines were shut down for a long time.
Since the earthquake struck in the middle of the night, the impact was still minimal, but if it had struck in the evening, it must have been very serious.
The Joban Line finally resumed operation after 6:00 a.m. the next morning, but disruptions to the schedule continued throughout the day.
The Keiyo Line and Musashino Line, which have many elevated sections, did not resume operation until much later.
The day after the earthquake, I was supposed to go to the Softbank store in Kashiwa to cancel my wife's cell phone, so I left a little early, but the train didn't show up and we ended up waiting at the station for about 45 minutes.
I recalled that the trains were stopped at the time of the Great East Japan Earthquake, and I walked for more than 10 hours from the union headquarters in Kanda, where I was working, to my home in Abiko, where I was living at the time.
Normally, it is not a good idea to walk home after a major earthquake, but I was worried about my mother because she was in a nursing home, so I decided to walk home.
There was no major damage in Tokyo, so I was hoping that the trains might start moving on the way, but in the end, the trains were completely cancelled that day.
Rapid trains on the Joban Line resumed operation the next day. So we were not so much affected at the time, but later I found out that the Joban Line between Toride and Tsuchiura finally started operating on March 18. This means that the trains were stopped for a week.
This is still better than that time, but it seems that the railroad is still vulnerable to earthquakes.
