Flying over Japan's sleepy suburb on Shonan Monorail
Only few of this kind exists in the world
I’ve ridden quite a few of unusual railways over the years, but the Shonan Monorail caught me off guard in the best possible way. I wasn’t even sure what to expect. I knew it was a monorail. I knew it went somewhere near the coast. What I didn’t fully appreciate until I was on it was that this is a suspended monorail, meaning the train doesn’t sit on top of a beam like you’d find at an airport people mover. It hangs below the beam, like a gondola on a rail, gliding and swaying through the hills of Kamakura.
There’s a moment, roughly 20 seconds into riding the Shonan Monorail, when it finally hit me. The train car swung gently as it was going around a curve after departing from the terminus station Ōfuna, and suddenly I was gliding over a busy intersection: small cars and trucks below, rooftops at eye level, a narrow residential street disappearing into the hills. I was no longer on a train - I was flying!
The story of the Shonan Monorail starts somewhere you might not expect: Wuppertal, Germany.
The Wuppertal Schwebebahn - literally, the “floating train” - has been carrying passengers over the Wupper River since 1901. This makes it the oldest suspended railway still in operation anywhere in the world. For engineers in the early twentieth century, it was the proof of concept of a bold ambition: a train could hang, it didn’t have to sit on tracks.
The French consortium SAFEGE advanced this monorail technology by enclosing the train’s running gear inside a hollow steel box beam to protect it from weather elements. Mitsubishi Heavy Industries licensed this smooth, quiet, and highly adaptable suspended design for use in Japan. They chose the steep, hilly terrain between Ōfuna and Enoshima to build a commercial line. This allowed the company to bypass the need for massive earthwork construction by simply placing pylons over existing roads.
Mitsubishi was also looking to prove, literally in their own backyard (the company has manufacturing plants and offices in the area) that their licensed SAFEGE technology could handle Japan’s conditions: seismic activity, challenging terrain, changing year-round weather. The Shonan corridor was perfect for all of this.
The Shonan Monorail opened on March 7, 1970, as the first suspended monorail in Japan, and it has been running ever since. In 2018, it formalized what always felt like an obvious friendship: it became sister railways with the Wuppertal Schwebebahn, the 125-year-old German line that, in a way, started all of this.
The line handles gradients of up to 7.4% and curves as tight as 100 metres on the main line. It passes through two tunnels: 451 m / 493 yrs under the hills near Kamakurayama, and 205 m / 224 yrs near the southern terminus. This is a remarkable achievement for a 6.6-km / 4 mile line. Locals and tourists alike sometimes describe riding it as something like a roller coaster, and they’re not entirely wrong.
The line runs from Ōfuna Station, a major hub on the JR Tokaido and Yokosuka lines, to Shōnan-Enoshima, a place to catch a popular, retro-style coastal tram Enoshima Electric Railway, also known as Enoden. Trains run every seven to eight minutes during peak hours. The entire line is eight stops and the ride takes about 14 minutes end-to-end.
The current fleet is made of seven three-car aluminium 5000 series sets, introduced in 2004, that replaced the fleet going back to the original 300 series that opened the line in 1970.
Despite its modest scale, the line carries nearly 30,000 passengers daily. That’s not a tourist attraction, that’s a working commuter line. The Shonan coast is a popular residential area for people working in Yokohama and Tokyo, and for many of them, the monorail is simply the quickest way between Ōfuna and their neighbourhood.
If you want to experience the line yourself, Ōfuna Station is easily accessible from Yokohama (about 15 minutes on the JR Tokaido Line) or from Tokyo’s Shinjuku via the Shonan-Shinjuku Line. The monorail terminus is a short walk from the JR platforms.
If Enoshima is on your itinerary - the island, the beaches, the shrine complex, the sea caves - the monorail will be both the practical way in and, frankly, the highlight of the day. Just sit back, relax, let the train navigate the first curve, and try not to smile when you pass over your first car below ∎.
Germany has two other Schwebebahns, a historic inclined one in the outskirts of Dresden and a more recent one at Dusseldorf Airport where it is known as the SkyTrain.
Arguably your best Beyond The Rails post to date!
There is also another overhead suspended monorail in Goa, India called the Skybus.
Monorail is a mode/technology that is far too under-reported on, in my opinion.
That you took the time to ride Japan’s Shonan Monorail and then provide all of the particulars in coverage and reporting of as you have done, all I can say is Kudos and well done, indeed!