Kyoto Railway Museum

Come for the roundhouse. Built in 1914 from reinforced concrete, it curves around a turntable with 20 tracks, and steam locomotives stand in the bays with their smokeboxes facing you. It is still a working depot, not a set piece: the engines are maintained here, and a few times a day one is turned on the turntable. It became an Important Cultural Property in 2004.

The rest of the museum is newer. It opened on 29 April 2016, taking over from the Umekoji Steam Locomotive Museum, which had been on this site since 1972, and it now holds more than 50 real trains, from steam engines to the 0 Series, the first Shinkansen. The main building explains how a railway works with signals, track and station equipment you can touch. The driving simulators are the part children want most, and on a busy day they are hard to get on. From the Sky Terrace on the roof you look down on the JR Kyoto Line and the Tokaido Shinkansen, with Kyoto Tower behind them. You leave through the old Nijo Station, a wooden station building from 1904 that was moved here.

Weekends and school holidays bring a lot of families with small children, and the main building gets loud. A weekday morning is calmer. The SL Steam train, a short ride of about 500 metres each way behind a real steam locomotive, costs extra: ¥300 for adults and ¥100 for children.

Buying ahead is probably still the better move. On JR West's own site an adult ticket cost us ¥1,400 instead of ¥1,500 at the door. Whether it also saves time depends on when you arrive. The people who queue before the 10:00 opening mostly have their tickets already, so when we waited for opening, the queue for pre-bought tickets was about four times as long as the queue at the ticket desk, and it moved only a little faster. Later in the day an advance ticket is more likely to get you straight in.

Admission is ¥1,500 for adults, ¥1,300 for university and high school students, ¥500 for junior high and elementary school children, and ¥200 from age three. The museum is open 10:00 to 17:00, last entry 16:30. It closes on Wednesdays, except on public holidays and in the spring and summer school holidays, and from 30 December to 1 January.

It is an easy 15 to 20 minute walk from Kyoto Station; last time we walked there and took the train back. The train is the JR Sagano Line, one stop to Umekoji-Kyotonishi, two minutes from the entrance. It is the same line that carries on to Arashiyama, so it can be crowded. Kyoto Aquarium is at the other end of Umekoji Park if you want to make a day of it. Allow two to three hours here, more if the steam train and the simulators are on the list.