Shinkansen
Services

Originally intended to carry passenger trains by day and freight trains by night, the Shinkansen lines carried exclusively passengers for the first five and a half decades of their operation. Since 2019 light freight has been carried on some passenger services, and there are plans to expand this with freight-only trains in the future.

The system shuts down between midnight and 06:00 every day for maintenance. The few overnight passenger trains that still run in Japan run on the older narrow gauge network that the Shinkansen parallels.

There are three principal service types on the Shinkansen:
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