July 15, 2000, was just another hot and humid summer's day in Japan. For the hundreds aboard the Joetsu Shinkansen "Asahi 402," though, it was a day they would never forget -- after they were trapped on the train for two hours without water or air conditioning.
The incident occurred at 9:38 a.m. when a crow hit one of the train's pantographs and cut all its power. As the nearly 350 passengers en route to Tokyo from Niigata sweltered inside the carriages whose windows don't open and doors wouldn't without power, 68 trains were suspended and around 51,000 people's travel plans were thrown into disarray. Altogether, it was 7 hours 40 minutes before all services were again running normally.
"It should have been a simple task to fix the problem," says Shoichi Ooizumi, a 36-year-old instructor of shinkansen drivers at East Japan Railway Co. "But the communication between the driver and the dispatcher in the area's control center didn't go well, resulting in confusion."