It’s a little bit old news, but the passengers of the 3rd generation Keisei Skyliner exceeded 50 million on June 9th last year. I'm going to bring up this topic today.
Let's take a quick look at Skyliner to start. It’s an airport access train between the city center of Tokyo and New Tokyo International (Narita) Airport. The current Skyliner, namely the EMU AE series, was commissioned in 2010 to replace the old model, the AE100 series. The AE series is an EMU for 1,435-millimeter-gauge and 1,500 V DC track. A total of 8 trainsets, 64 cars, were built by Nippon Sharyo and Tokyu Sharyo. One trainset is composed of 6 motorcars and 2 trailers (6M2T). The electric control system is an IGBT-VVVF (Insulated Gate Bipolar Transistor - variable frequency drive) inverter with 175kW induction motors. The AE series is able to travel with a 160 kilometers per hour maximum speed, which is the fastest in Japan except the Shinkansen vehicles.
The AE series reached 20 million passengers in September, 2016. It then achieved 25 million passengers in November, 2017 and 45 million passengers in October, 2023. The period between the 45 millionth and the 50 millionth passengers (June, 2024) was only 8 months. Keisei Electric Railway held a commemoration ceremony at Narita Airport Terminal 1 station. The 50 millionth passenger was a Japanese mother with her two little daughters. Currently, one trainset of the AE series, namely trainset AE2, has a gold-colored commemoration sticker on the front of the train. Congratulations on the 50 million passengers!
