When visiting and traveling on your own throughout Japan, navigating the train systems is usually on top of the lists to plan. Hyperdia can be your best friend in Japan when it comes to traveling by trains. For most individuals who don’t know how to guide themselves in Japan, the train stations can be centers of chaos. Some travelers are just not used to using trains in their daily lives in their native countries. During this time of need, Hyperdia is one useful application and website that can be used for navigating the train system.
Traveling in a country that depends heavily on trains can be overwhelming for foreign travelers who don’t know how to guide themselves using the train systems. First, let’s go over the main line used in the Tokyo area, the Yamanote Line. This line consists of stations and is shaped as a loop which goes through the majority of the important cities in the Tokyo area. Other lines will usually go North-South or East-West before turning into a different line or coming to the end of its tracks. However, the Yamanote Line will go around in a circle, so there’s less of chance in getting lost if you rode this train line. Just in case you do get lost, just remember that the lines are color-coded on many maps, conveniently it is set up the same way on the Hyperdia application. So the names in romaji and the colors of the maps make it easier to match up most of the Hyperdia routes that show up on your results.
The best thing about Hyperdia is that it will allow you to place the starting station with the departure time, and the ending station. Once you lock in your requests, Hyperdia will let you know what routes you can expect to use along with the approximate arrival time. The application will give you at least 5 different routes you can take and you can change the results up to a maximum of 10. It can be even easier when your search results are also filtered based on the cheapest or the fastest routes. There is even the option to find out the first and last train to your destination. It is important to remember that the trains do not run 24/7 and it would be good to remember the time of the last train to your area. However, with most systems, there are some cons to using this application as with others.
Hyperdia, although magnificent and helpful to most English-only users, can have some difficulty when typing the names of the stations, for example. Many stations share the same name, sometimes it can only be distinguished by the location of the station. Knowing which region or city you are in will help Hyperdia give you better results. In case there are a few stations with the same name, Hyperdia’s drop-down list appears for list of alternative names that may show up. Also, sometimes a station name will not be recognized if a dashed is not used. For example, Koku Koen may be the station, but you have to enter it as Koku-Koen for it to register on Hyperdia.
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