Workshop "Let's Draw! Buildings and a Steam Locomotive"

Before you go

The roundhouse, built in 1914, is now a nationally designated Important Cultural Property, and the workshop meets in front of it.

The roundhouse is a reinforced-concrete building designed by Watanabe Setsu, architect with the Railway Board, and was completed in November 1914. In 2004 it was designated a national Important Cultural Property, together with the 5-tonne electric ceiling crane built in 1915 and the sidings, and it was also chosen as a civil engineering heritage site. The roundhouse holds twenty steam locomotives of eighteen types.

The workshop's subject is the roundhouse itself: the functional beauty of concrete. Oil-painting students from Saga Art University take elementary-school children to look at the roundhouse and sketch it — look slowly, and the roundhouse shows a new side. The workshop is for children, held in the roundhouse area.

It belongs to the Kyoto Station 150th anniversary exhibition. The same notice lists an adult lecture by a museum curator on railways and architecture, and a special opening of a sleeper car: a Series 24 A-sleeper built in 1973, which once ran on the Akatsuki and Suisei services.

Beyond the roundhouse, the museum's own past is worth a note: the Umekoji Steam Locomotive Museum opened on 10 October 1972, and its archive hall uses the old Nijo Station building, built in 1904 by the Kyoto Railway to double as its head office — Wikipedia calls it the oldest surviving wooden two-storey Japanese-style station building in Japan.

Booking

Participation is free; museum admission is required. No advance application: pick up a numbered time ticket at the venue, from 10:30 for the morning session and 13:30 for the afternoon sessions, while tickets last.