Umekoji Locomotive Depot

Japan's Oldest Surviving Concrete Roundhouse

Umekōji Locomotive Shed (梅小路機関車庫, Umekōji Kikanshako, also written Umekoji) is a fan-shaped reinforced concrete engine shed in Shimogyō Ward, Kyoto, completed in November 1914 and designated an Important Cultural Property on 10 December 2004.

It sits about 1.5 kilometres west of Kyoto Station and is the oldest reinforced concrete locomotive shed still standing in Japan. Twenty stub tracks radiate from a turntable at the front, spreading the building into a broad arc that runs roughly east to west. The footprint covers 3,870.57 square metres. The designation takes in the electric overhead travelling crane and the sidings as well as the structure.

The shed went up as part of the Kyoto Station improvement works, a response to rising passenger and freight traffic through the city. Ground was broken in December 1913 and the building finished eleven months later, according to the 1917 record of those works published by the Railway Board's Western Railway Bureau. Ōbayashi-gumi carried out the construction.

Who designed it is a more interesting question. No document setting out the design team survives. A 1952 round-table discussion among railway figures, published in Tetsudō Kenchiku News, records that Setsu Watanabe, the Railway Board engineer responsible for the Kyoto Station main building, took charge of the design, working with guidance from Tarō Ishida on the plan and Maeo Ōinoue on the structure. The Agency for Cultural Affairs reproduces that account with the caveat about its source.

The Building Itself

Construction used the Hennebique system, an early French method of reinforced concrete framing in which beams, columns and slabs are cast as a monolithic whole. In 1914 this was still new technology in Japan, and applying it at this scale to an industrial building was a considerable undertaking.

The elevation is straightforwardly structural: columns and beams, with main girders arranged radially to follow the fan. Openings across the front carry transoms above; the sides and rear take tall vertical windows. The roof is flat, finished with asphalt roofing. Walls are sprayed mortar and floors are mostly asphalt.

Inside, the shed divides into three functional parts.

The machine shop occupies seven trapezoidal bays laid side by side, each measuring 4.6 metres across the front, 8.1 metres at the back and 23.4 metres deep. Seven ash pits sit at even radial intervals for inspecting the underside of a locomotive, and a curved drop pit for repair work is set into the floor at the western end. Behind this section the roof lifts a full storey to accommodate a large frame spanning 15.6 metres at a height of 12.2 metres, carrying the electric overhead travelling crane built by Tsukishima Kikai in 1915.

The workshop behind the machine shop is rectangular, 22.8 metres along the side and 24.0 metres at the rear, with another curved drop pit near the centre and an office in the southeast corner behind an iron door.

The stabling area holds the remaining thirteen roads. The eastern ten are cut deeper than the western three so that larger locomotives could be housed. Look at the eastern gable wall and you will find brick rather than concrete: it was built that way to allow the shed to be extended later, an extension that never came.

Designation rested on two of the statutory criteria, technical excellence and high historical value. The scale of the framing and the logic of the plan let repair work proceed efficiently, and the shed did real work in expanding the country's rail capacity through the Taishō and Shōwa periods.

Visiting the Shed

The building is in use, which is unusual for an Important Cultural Property of this size. It forms part of the Kyoto Railway Museum, which opened on 29 April 2016 as an expansion of the Umekōji Steam Locomotive Museum that had occupied the site since 1972. Twenty steam locomotives representing the Meiji through Shōwa eras stand under the shed roof.

Admission to the shed comes with museum entry, and no separate reservation is needed. The turntable in front still turns. When the SL Steam-gō excursion train finishes its last run of the day, the locomotive is uncoupled, the accumulated ash dropped, coal and water taken on for the following morning, and the engine rotated on the turntable before entering the shed. Late afternoon is the time to be standing there.

The connecting deck on the second floor of the main hall gives the view most photographers want, looking down across the whole arc with the city beyond. From ground level the fan reads quite differently, as a wall of locomotive fronts.

A behind-the-scenes tour run by museum staff enters the shed before opening hours to watch the Steam-gō preparation work, with numbers capped and advance booking required. Photography is permitted throughout the museum.

Getting there is easy. Umekōji-Kyotonishi Station on the Sagano Line is the closest stop, one station from Kyoto Station, and the walk from Kyoto Station itself takes about twenty minutes through Umekōji Park. The former Nijō Station building of 1904, one of Japan's oldest surviving wooden station buildings and a Kyoto municipal cultural property, was moved here and now serves as the museum shop.