Keage Incline

The Keage Incline is a railway for boats. Between 1891 and 1948 it carried cargo and passenger boats on flat wagons up and down a 36-metre drop at the western end of the Lake Biwa Canal, the great engineering project that brought water from Japan's largest lake over the hills into Kyoto. The canal itself was built between 1885 and 1890 under Tanabe Sakurō, a young graduate of the Imperial College of Engineering in Tokyo who had written his thesis on the scheme and was then hired as its chief engineer. Where the canal reached the steep slope above Nanzen-ji, boats could not continue by water, so they were winched along rails some 582 metres long between the Keage and Nanzen-ji docks.

Traffic stopped in 1948, but the rails remain in place, and the incline is now a designated national historic site. It has also become one of Kyoto's best-loved cherry blossom walks: around ninety Somei Yoshino trees line both sides of the wide old track, and in spring their blossom meets overhead in a tunnel of pale pink. Walking up the grade between the rails, laid to an unusually wide nine-foot gauge, it is easy to imagine the boats being hauled past the same trees a century ago.

The incline is the centrepiece of a small landscape of Meiji-era waterworks. Beneath it runs the Nejiri-manpo, a small brick tunnel for people passing under the tracks. At the foot of the slope, water from the canal once drove Japan's first commercial hydroelectric station, opened in 1891, and nearby the brick Suirokaku aqueduct still carries canal water through the grounds of Nanzen-ji temple. The track is open to walk at any time.

Getting there

The incline is in Higashiyama Ward in eastern Kyoto, about 4 km from the city centre. Keage Station on the Kyoto Municipal Subway Tozai Line is about a three-minute walk away. The nearest airport is Osaka Itami (ITM), about 41 km away.