On March 5th, 2023, Seibu Railway launched a special poster train, "Moi! Moomin Hanno" on their Ikebukuro line. The purpose of this poster train is to promote tourism to the theme park named "Moominvalley Park" on the line.
To start, let me quickly review Moominvalley Park. Moomin is a popular novel, comic and animation series created by a Finnish illustrator, Tove Jansson. In Japan, the TV animation started in 1969, and soon became popular among children. The Moomin family lives in their house in Moominvalley. Catching onto the popularity of Moomin, a theme park named Moominvalley Park was opened in 2019 near Hanno station on the Seibu-Ikebukuro line.
"Moi! Moomin Hanno" train is a 10-car train, 40152F of the EMU Seibu 40000 series. It was built in 2020 by Kawasaki Heavy Industries. We can see many Moomin characters on the train bodies. These characters are very cute, and definitely contribute to promote tourism to Moominvalley Park. "Moi!" means "Hello!" in Finnish. I learned something new from the train. Thank you, Seibu Railway.
Incidentally, speaking of 40152F, I remembered that this train set was once used as the other poster train, named "Kanahei". It was a special train to promote tourism to Kawagoe City on the Seibu-Shinjuku line. A famous cartoonist, Kanahei, designed the bodies of the train, so, we could see many of Kanahei's animal characters and Kawagoe's historic spots on the Kanahei train. From Kanahei to Moomin... 40152F is continuously busy for promoting tourism to the Seibu lines.
