This was the first of many peculiarities about my experience on board the Resort Shirakami Train, which crawls along the Gonō Line through Akita Prefecture in northern Honshu's Tōhoku region. Slow by anyone's standards, it's a train purposely built for travelling tortoise-like from the city of Aomori to Akita, often averaging just 10km/h. Operator JR-East (East Japan Railway Company) calls the service a "Joyful Train", and a trip on such a leaden-footed locomotive is like few other sightseeing journeys in the country.
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