Half a century of quadruple tracking — from the 1964 plan to completion in 2018

Half a century of patience, and the question of the next one

What distinguishes this decision is that it was not one manager’s single choice but a sustained undertaking spanning the terms of many presidents — an administrative planning decision, followed by fifty years of continuous financing and construction. The anxiety over “an enormous sum of money” that Ando Naroku, then president, expressed in 1965 runs as an undercurrent beneath Odakyu’s management agenda for more than half a century, all the way to the single word — “overwhelming” — with which president Hoshino Koji greeted completion in 2018.

That said, had the investment lacked the tailwind of a growing population along the line, it is hard to deny that the fifty-four years themselves could have remained a burden. Quadruple tracking bore fruit partly because the surrounding businesses — commercial development at the Shinjuku terminal, taking the Enoshima Electric Railway wholly in-house — supplied the earnings in the meantime. The redevelopment of the Shinjuku west exit begun in the 2020s is an investment of the same kind, carrying a long financing burden, and the way of facing long-term investment that quadruple tracking demonstrated looks likely to be tested there too.