Odakyu Virtual Railway Museum (小田急バーチャル鉄道博物館)

» see odakyu.jp/museum/ as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

The Odakyu line opened in 1927 and turned eighty in 2007, and the company marked it with a website rather than a building. Ten types of its rolling stock were modeled in 3DCG, from the first Romancecar through to the 4000 series then arriving on the commuter runs, and visitors could rotate a carriage in place or watch a CG film that sent the newest trains through scenery rebuilt from the year the line had opened. It went live on 14 October, which in Japan is Railway Day. The company had picked the date on purpose.

Underneath the modeling it was a plain corporate microsite, served off odakyu.jp with a Shift_JIS charset and a copyright line in the head. The front page offered a full-screen button next to a normal-screen button, under a note recommending you turn the sound on. Below that sat a panel of requirements. It wanted a screen of 1024 by 768 on a broadband connection, and it wanted Adobe Flash Player 8 or above. There was a link to download the plugin, in case you were the sort of visitor who did not have it.

That last requirement is the whole obituary. Adobe had set a termination date for Flash back in 2017, the last day of December 2020, and that deadline held. The virtual museum went dark on 25 December 2020, a Friday, under a notice posted on the site itself: the museum would end its public run on that date, with thanks for many years of patronage. Odakyu never gave a reason. Nothing in the notice mentions Flash, and the connection is mine to draw, from a requirements panel and a gap of six days.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ four rooms ~

The site was laid out as a museum with four halls, and the naming was literal enough to be charming. The 車両展示室, the rolling-stock exhibition room, held the 3DCG trains. 沿線フォトヒストリー was a photographic history of the land the line runs through. The 小田急資料室, the archive room, let you search the fleet both retired and serving, along with the company's old excursion trains, and pull up a written summary and photographs for each. It also displayed commemorative tickets and staff uniforms.

The fourth was クイズ・ザ・オダキュー, a quiz graded from beginner up to advanced, which paid out in original wallpapers for your desktop or your phone. That is a 2007 reward in its purest form, and it is also the clearest signal of who the thing was built for. A company keyword list on the page put おだきゅうキッズ, the railway's children's brand, in among the model numbers.

~ the plugin went first ~

Odakyu is a private commuter railway running west out of Shinjuku to Odawara and Enoshima, and outside the people who ride it the brand carries nothing at all. I had never heard of the company before I went looking for this. The thing that killed its museum, though, took down work everywhere at the same time, and anyone who built for the web between about 1998 and 2012 watched some piece of their own output stop opening that winter.

What is unusual here is the lead time. Flash had been under a published death sentence since 2017, and by 2020 almost everything with a budget had been rewritten in HTML5 or quietly deleted. A railway company's anniversary site from 2007 had neither a budget nor an obvious owner, so it simply ran until the deadline and then stopped, four pixel-perfect halls of rotating trains still working on the day they were switched off.

~ the museum they built instead ~

The virtual museum closed on 25 December 2020. On 19 April 2021, a hundred and fifteen days later, Odakyu opened the Romancecar Museum next to Ebina station. Eleven real carriages across six types stood on the ground floor, with a model diorama and a driving simulator upstairs. An adult paid nine hundred yen and a three-year-old paid a hundred. Admission was by advance reservation at first, which was a pandemic measure rather than a design choice.

The press noted at the time that this was the first permanent indoor exhibition facility the company had ever built, in the ninety-four years since the line opened. Odakyu spent thirteen of those years running a museum that existed only as a plugin. It shut that one in the week Flash died and put up the real one the following spring.

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