The Edo-Tokyo Open-Air Architectural Museum is a lovely place where you can see many historic Japanese buildings. It’s located in Koganei City, about 30 kilometers west of central Tokyo. Since the 17th century, Tokyo has lost a number of precious old buildings because of fires, floods, earthquakes, and even wars. To protect and share what’s left, the Tokyo Metropolitan Government opened this museum in 1993 as an annex of the Edo-Tokyo Museum. The museum’s goal is to relocate, rebuild, and preserve buildings of great cultural value, and to hand down these treasures to future generations. One of my favorite spots is the public bathhouse Kodakara-yu (see the photo below).
The museum doesn’t just display old buildings. Please take a look at the top photo — this is unit 7514 of the Toei 7500 series tram. The 7500 series was introduced in 1962 as a mid-sized (12.52-meter-long) double-bogie tramcar for the Tokyo streetcar lines. Each car had two 60 kW DC motors and could run up to 40 kilometers per hour. After running for 16 years, unit 7514 was retired in 1978.
By the way, unit 7504, which I showed in a previous post, is a “sister car” of this one. You may notice that the color of the body stripe is different. The red stripe on unit 7514 was the original design used when the series debuted in 1962. On the other hand, the blue stripe on unit 7504 appeared around 1975, when one-man (driver-only) operation started.
