The Shinkansen 500

On June, 30, JR West introduced a Shinkansen 500 refurbished with the famous character Hello Kitty.
Let’s study the story of this Shinkansen model introduced in 1997.
SpeedThe Shinkansen 500 developed by JR West first ran in 1997 between Shin-Osaka and Fukuoka on the Sanyo Shinkansen Line. In 1998, they ran 7 round trip daily between Tokyo and Hakata as a Nozomi. First the first time, The journey was less than one hour, 4h49.

In 1999, the 700 series made its debut and was considered as more suitable with two doors by car instead of only one for the Shinkansen 500. In the end, JR West produced only 9 500 series and operations on the Nozomi service ended in February 2010.

Learn more about the history of the shinkansen.

Design
The Shinkansen 500 is very impressive by its nose. It was designed to easily cut through walls of air and was inspired by a bird.

Evangelion and hello Kitty
In 2015, a special 500 Type Eva Bullet train was introduced to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the opening of the Sanyo Line and the 20th anniversary of the first broadcast of classic anime series «  Neon Genesis Evangelion ». It became very popular but stopped in may 2018. In June 2018 , Hello Kitty Shinkansen was launched.