about us

our name

“Nankaru”is abbreviation of “Nanbu-Keiben Tetsudo”( Nanbu Light Railway ), derived from the title of an imaginary story of a railway. The fictitous railway story was published in a railway magazine in late 60s by Kemuri Production. With unkown photographs of rollingstock and scenery, it was so elaborate and fascinating that many of the readers believed it was a real one, and tried to find the place.

change of the times

After publishing their only book “Salute to Steam” ( Koyusha 1971), Kemuri Pro stopped its activity, and one of the members, late Naohiro Kuramochi founded “Joe Works” which made and distributed various model trains world wide. While some of them worked as members of RASS ( Japan’s only group for restoring 2-footers ).
Their legendary work “Salute to Steam” has been out of print, its influence seems being faded out, but its philosophy was undercurrent of railfans sentiment.

returns

After 40 years of silence, surviving members of Kemuri Pro again started to work with their younger followers to unearth their huge amount of photographs taken in 1960s and early 70s. Longtime missing, forgotten, amazing scenes of light railways and short lines in Japan,Taiwan India and Brazil are being preserved in digital data.
Now this treasury of thousands of rare photographs are waiting its time to be open to the public.

upcoming

We published “Keelung 1966” as the first issue of the series “Steams on 2ft. tracks” in 2012, “Darjeeling & Matheran 1969” in the following year, and “Estrada de Ferro Perus-Pirapora 1971” in 2014.
This year we have just published our new book on on Kaijima coal mine in Japan, where old Alco and Koppel steam engines ran and Bucyrus steam shovels worked in early60s. Details are here.