Building the Airport Line to Chubu Centrair (2005)

Choosing defence and offence at the same moment

In this period the company was engaged in defensive restructuring — reviewing unprofitable lines, spinning businesses out into subsidiaries — and had been written up in 1999 as the great name that could not restructure. In the middle of that, it laid 4.2 kilometres beyond Tokoname, connected the track so that a passenger could reach the airport from Meitetsu Nagoya without changing trains, and ran the Mu-Sky limited express over it. The character of the investment shows in the fact that defence and offence were chosen at the same moment.

But the demand an airport carries is not tied to the population along a line the way commuting and school traffic are. It swings with the economy, with international conditions, with the rise and fall of inbound visitors, and the opening did not by itself promise stable earnings. What Meitetsu sought in the Airport Line was to graft onto railway revenue, long dependent on population, a variable that population does not govern. In becoming part of the network, those 4.2 kilometres took on the problem of how to convert demand originating outside the line into revenue.