This bus transforms into a train 

Father

This might just be what I need to bus

I was thinking the Stourbridge Shuttle did exactly the same as this on the video, as in going on the road and the rails. So if anyone wants a job on the rails...

Can confirm that is goes out the same time. I got pinged for the email, and saw this mere minutes later.

One of the few Emails in my inbox that actually gets opened and read...... 📧 👀 🥳

And the bus replacement rail service that Tom featured some years ago

Especially since it doesn't even replace the rails :D

​@@JohnR31415 A bus replacement rail replacement bus, then? 😂

@@matthewwatt2295 Actually, it's a bus replacement rail replacement bus-train.

Truss bain...tuss brain 😊

Now we need to send The Tim Traveller, Geoff Marshall, Jago Hazzard, and Reese M. there.

And, seemingly, the only one there.

Also Sheldon

Just look how happy he was at the moment the vehicle switched modes. He's the target audience.

It's always nice to see him being genuinely interested and excited about what he does.

I'm so glad you pointed this out! I actually delayed watching this video because I couldn't give the screen my full attention for the subtitles. The dub is so helpful!

I was today years old when I learned this is even a thing on RU-vid. I had no idea some videos can have different audio tracks. Thanks for the education! 😁 👍 Edit: Looks like this is a new feature. Guess I'm not clueless after all. 😋

I also just noticed that and read the video description. Interesting stuff

Thx for pointing it out more people need to learn about it being a part of his videos since you don't usually look for that feature, especially since I didn't even know it existed

Wait what? Since when does RU-vid has that function? I love it 👍

@@JakeGutteridge Finally they added some good features instead of just taking them away.

He does do a great job with the visuals and research, doesn’t he? And the methods his team uses for subtitling are great - different colors for different people, and now enabling the new audio features. Always a thumbs-up from me

I mean considering how famous he and his videos has become over the 10+ years he's been doing this I don't think it's that difficult anymore for him to set up interviews with company and governmental officials anymore

Tom's probably one of the peaks on RU-vid for professionalism, dedication, transparency and integrity, I never expect anything less than this level of effort from him

i think every Mr Beast video has them

If you knew you were getting paid it'd be OK.

I bet it plays in your head each time you get in your car.

Having it's own theme song like it's a transformer going into battle.

Japanese are used to annoying jingle lmao *flashback of me going to buy fish in japanese supermarket*

@@Banom7a so true. All the supermarkets too, just the same half dozen jingles over and over and over

Yet it is kept in operation unchanged?

🤣 Yah, this _would_ be a good one! (Especially if his guests haven't watched the video, or have had enough time to largely forget it.)

@@Leo0718 another clue could be, “it has a perfect safety record”.

@@Case16710 I might add that in the question just because the incongruency of that would be fun. If you don't know the answer these two things seem like they should not be referring to the same thing.

@@seraphina985 good point!

He was fantastic. I'm someone who's no means fluent in Japanese but I can get by. The way he made himself understandable was outstanding.

Japan allowed jingles on everything but doesn't allow any phones and digital cameras have a shutter sound when taking a photo.

Because the country is a whole circus after getting bombed

"Metamorphisis completed sir! Bus train has now become... *drums* train bus!"

I mean, if this is your daily commute, it'll get really old really fast.

It is very Japanese. Kawai or the quantifiable level of 'cuteness' is part of judging things in the Japanese culture. Hello Kitty is an example of Kawai colliding with capitalism.

Having it's own theme song makes it feel like it's a transformer going into battle.

Modo chengi - STARTO!

Given how many tim and reece have gone through, he's got quite the backlog.

Is it a gadgetbahn? I thought that was a train that was on tracks, but runs on rubber tires.

He might if people don’t keep giving new concepts a chance.

This isn't really a Gadgetbahn (to me, at least). It's meant to preserve the rail line, not revolutionize transit.

​@@RHTeebs a gadgetbahn can be any silly and needlessly overcomplicated transport method, rubber tyred trains are just one example

Yea, as a fairly new learner of Japanese, I could still pick out the verb and subject of each sentence easily even when I didn't know the vocab for the words themselves. Usually native speakers go too fast for me, and I get lost because I missed a particle somewhere. I really like the interviewee and his way of speaking slowly and clearly. Not many people of any nationality do that.

@@animeartist888 keep it up! before you know it you won't even notice verbs and subjects and particles, it will just sound like meaning!

Using RU-vid money, so in a way, you bough a little bit of that plushie.

@@bertilhatt the real treasure are the plushies we met along the way

i love plushies i want one,,

Agreed. I’m studying, still N5, and he’s great to listen to.

yes!! though he lost me when he started talking about pulse sensors and whatchamacallits

I was literally thinking the same, he's super clear has great oral cadence and clearly makes every sound for each and every word

maybe he is or was an announcer for stops and stations

And his hand gestures are on point!

I'm curious what Not Just Bikes thinks of such gimmicky infrastructure! Maybe fine in a declining coast town but this seems like a very specific case in justifying keeping aging rails 😂

There's a whole cool Japanese transportation rabitthole you can go down, they have things like sleeper busses with private booths, trains with an entire vending machine car, high speed trains, trains with an office room you can rent to have a business meeting on the train etc etc. So much cool stuff.

I’ll love to see a Japan series of your videos.

Haha, I'd love to help you with that! Been living in Kanto area for 20 years! Wish I could have helped Tom out with his visit!

Well done on Liking The Thing

Tbh, I'm kind of for gadgetbahns that save rails so that the rails can be used if the population ever increases or if demand ever increases

@@blu0065 arguably, simply by opperating on existing standard rails, a significant percentage of the things that make a gadgetbahn what it is are eliminated. (of course, that doesn't automatically make it NOT a gadgetbahn, but it does put it lower down the scale by quite a bit. Usually.)

Funny how the English-speaking Japanese RU-vidrs never got to this thing before Tom.

I confess my sins at the DMV.

He happened to get there when there weren't any lines.

@@TesserId not scientifically possible

Respite was brief, and then there were lines again like with all DMVs

If you had to take this DMV to get to the DMV it might be more fun.

king

Oh that explains how they got the design and budget to build the thing!

It failed more so because of the large amount of snow that the specific area of Hokkaido gets. The cost was greater than the practicality. I remember a news segment about them closing the rail station since the final high school student graduated from that village. There were talks of running a similar system in Gifu and Toyama prefectures, but ran into a similar problem where the weather would hinder it more.

FYI JR Hokkaido is a privatized entity like the rest of japan’s ex national rail, however because it is highly unprofitable all its shares are still owned by the government. Unlike JR East, JR Central, JR West, and JR Kyushu, which are all privatized and make lots of profit from rail, real estate and other ventures. Those companies the government sold all their shares and you can freely buy them on the stock market.

@@jickhertz4124 they're not as nice but crew bus road rail vehicle for railworkers have existed for a while. This looks like they did the conversation on a nice bus instead of the normal povo spec vinyl floor and canvas seats version.

@@hannahranga It looks like a Toyota Coaster with an addition for the rail-wheels. The resulting massive front overhang must take some getting used to when driving on the roads.

I see more differences than similarities between this and the Adelaided O-Bahn. What you're referring to is a guided busway.

There's an "o-bahn" in Japan too- Yutorito

The two systems address the same problem but are VERY different. The O-Bahn uses concrete guides rather than steel rails, and its use is limited to buses. Also it needed new, bespoke construction. Hybrids are designed to run on existing steel rails without special accommodations or new construction.

Transformers…. More than meets the eye…

Its reason for existing, as explained in the video, is to keep the railway operational

@@Kyrelel by being cool :P

If your train service is dying a slow death... you've already got existing track and stations, it might be cheaper to convert a couple of buses into DMVs like this rather than rip up the otherwise unused tracks but tracks are expensive to maintain, and in this case completely unnecessary, I do wonder how long this cool thing will exist

@@benja_mint since the cost to maintain track is generally proportional to the tonnage that travels over it, this still had much lower track maintenance than a train track

Replace cool with mildly amusing.

And one is ending while the other is just getting started (although with 1 year already)

+

Tim is the new (next) Tom!

maybe we can get a Tim Tom collab one day

Revenge for Tim making a reaction ferry video 😈

if this was the USA, they just rip off all the rail, and not think about long-term at all.

Japan has a lot of gimmicky attractions and other stuff. The obvious one is many unique foods like Kit Kat chocolates and fast food stuffs.

i think it is quite smart way to save rail, otherwise the busses would just take road and the rail would be gone

Um... really fun, I guess

Yes, but also yes!

It won't revolutionize public transit, but it's cool nonetheless.

Defenition of Railbus has been found.

No, it's a bus AND a train!!

It’s Awa Odori. Tokushima’s traditional dance. You can google it. It’s spectacular

I think it’s traditional dance festival music (awa odori).

Oh wow, I didn't even notice there were different audio tracks, what the heck

I kind of hope that they have plushies that play the jingle.

same

The one Tim Traveler just covered?

I thought it would be like the Leigh guided busway, I am also impressed

5... 4... 3... 2... 1... DMVs are go!

It has had some adoption outside of Japan, GO Transit in Toronto, Canada also has used “Point and Call” since 2021.

Not sure your timestamp is correct

I have heard of it. it makes sense, so it will never be adopted in the US.

I just seen the video demonstration of it now, it is very fascinating

@@kenbrown2808 in fact, it is used in the us. You can see conductors point and call before opening the doors after they pull into the station in every NYC subway station. They point at zebra striped boards that indicate that the train has stopped at the correct location so that all cars will open onto the platform, not onto the track.

I was half-expecting a Sailor Moon style transformation sequence.

the bus serving one of the tram lines while recharging.

To think picking street view locations in Japan in Google maps (which was how I found out about this train) would play a very small part in a Tom Scott video is rather mind boggling.

Oh i suggestet it, too! Really cool bua/Trainer that fits to his Videos really well.

My thoughts exactly.

That'd be the "guided busways" he spoke about

Although this seems like the smarter way around than a bus with a rail in the midde, this doesn't have the same road wear problems.

I forgot that Tom's last video about the world's "oldest business" was in Japan and I almost expected him to also have rushed out to film some of the last runs of the Nancy TVR when I read the title, because I'd watched said video by The Tim Traveller ("Why Nancy Is Scrapping Its Magically Bonkers Monorail-Bus-Trams", for the curious)

it's even more logical than self-driving car tunnel or that freight robot train thingy. i think rail maintenance is easier than highway maintenance but idk the real numbers

I was thinking I’d probably be a good solution for a lot of American cities that want rail transit,it can give you the potential speed from rail being separated like it is but also can give you flexibility like with buses, maybe when a train is holding up the railway you just use it as a bus instead. Shifting the route around it. Needs more R&D but smarter people can make it work

it also eliminates one transfer as well.

What about this system is innovative or convenient? Innovative: Road-rail vehicles have been in use for a long long time. And not even the public bus part is anything new. Germany did that already in the 1950s. Convenient: Nothing about this is convenient. As stated in the video the route could be done by a normal bus.

Well, they have very large population, living on few small islands. The rest of the world should take an example from them and start building cities vertically. Just don´t copy their work habits...

Let us engage in Jolly Co-operation! 🌞

quick, we need innovation, our business is dying. *Let's put a minibus on train tracks*

Vehicles like these have been around for decades, they’ve just used a bus body on this example.

These types of vehicles already existed before your narrow view of the world came upon them.

The video by ITSUKA JAPAN? 😺

I hope he does something about the monorails and their big switches.

In Japan, there is only one line of the same kind, called Yutorito Line, which runs from _Ozone_ to _Obata Ryokuchi_ in Nagoya city.

I think that's a guided busway, not a dual mode vehicle. There are at least a couple of those in the UK too as well as throughout Europe, etc. The buses still fully run on their tyres (here the front axle is lifted off the ground) and don't have additional sets of steel wheels for adapting them to steel rails. Those buses will have small horizontal caster-like wheels connected to the steering linkage under the bus which run against the high kerbs the busways have to guide the bus without the driver steering. It means those bus lanes (what they're more in line with than a railway) can be made with much less material as they don't have to be wide enough for a human driver to weave safely. This is natural weaving as the vehicle moves on it's suspension, driver in seat, etc, nothing extreme but something that means the tyres won't perfectly follow the exact same path every time they go down a certain piece of road. The lanes can also then only have 'road surface' under the tyres and no need for anything in between as the guide wheels on the sides mean the bus will follow the exact same path every time it goes down that lane. Technically any vehicle with a wide enough track (side-to-side distance between the wheels on each axle) can still use those busways if the driver pays enough attention to keep the wheels on the strips of concrete the buses run on. Cars will only get stuck because they have a significantly narrower track than the busses they were built for, and the type of driver who doesn't pay enough attention to the signage that highlights they're not suitable for anything other than those buses won't be paying enough attention to the surface to keep their wheels on those 2 strips of concrete, so they'll run off them into the gap and get stuck, much like someone driving off the edge of a narrow single track road with a soft verge or a ditch close to the road. It isn't the same as turning onto railway tracks after driving onto a level crossing, although people have done that too. I think Tom mentioned that they could have replaced this railway with a guided busway, instead of modifying buses to run on the rails then training dual licence drivers to drive them, but it was more cost effective to not tear up the railway or preferable to keep the railway intact for historic reasons or similar, alongside the tourism appeal of such a setup of course.

I'd love to move there permanently. Their "art style" of buildings, road markings, people, flags etc etc. is just so nice & not seen anywhere else

you'll realise how far in the stone age you are

Warning to anyone who wants to move there, if you don't like paperwork, just don't also I hope you love waiting months for a bank statement, which you will need more often than anywhere else, it's a great place, but it's also the most bureaucratic nation in the world

@@deadboyo2773 As someone who had to submit my identity 7 times before PayPay finally accepted it, yes.

@@Sithhy I'd advise against it. Japan is rather xenophobic and there are a lot of issues besides.