It’s mid-spring in Tokyo, and daytime temperatures are now over 20 degrees Celsius every day. The best season of the year has arrived! I recently visited the bank of the Tama River bank on the Odakyu line.
As soon as I reached the embankment, what caught my eye was a double-double track railway bridge—the Odakyu Tama River Bridge. About five minutes later, my photo target appeared: the EMU Odakyu 70000 series, “Romancecar GSE (Graceful Super Express)”.
GSE is the newest model in the Romancecar fleet. It features upper-deck cockpits, allowing passengers to enjoy the forward view from the very front car. It also has large side windows that provide a clear, wide view of the scenery. The body color of the GSE is called “rose vermilion.”
Please take a look at the top photo—the GSE is crossing the Tama River in the morning sun, under a bright blue sky. Beautiful!
After finishing my train photography, I switched gears to another hobby of mine—fossil collecting. As I’ve mentioned before, it’s been my lifelong passion. This time, my hunting field was the riverbed near the Odakyu Tama River Bridge. In this area, we can observe many fossiliferous beds from the Iimuro Formation, which consists of shallow marine sediments deposited about 1.3 to 1.1 million years ago.
Please look at the photo below—this was my find of the day, a fossilized Fusumagai (Clementia vatheleti). It’s a large, thick, rounded bivalve. Welcome back to the world above ground, after more than a million years!
I truly served a double purpose that day on the Odakyu Line.
