[Bonus: Special postcard included] RM Re-Library 9 The birth and end of the 3-axle freight car

RM Re-Library is a reprint of two or three of the best volumes from the RM LIBRARY, which has a long history of over 270 issues.
The 9th volume of the series will be the first to feature freight cars. It will focus on the "3-axle freight car," which had an extremely unique presence in the history of JNR freight cars. This will be a reprint of the very early volumes, volumes 8 and 9 of the RM Library. In addition, this will be a combined book of the two volumes that were originally in two parts, volume 8 being the "prewar edition" and volume 9 being the "postwar edition."

Currently, all three-axle freight cars have been scrapped, having outlived their usefulness. The aim was to make them more flexible than two-axle cars, while being less complicated in structure than bogie cars. Looking at history, they were by no means a minority, with 12,000 cars having left their mark on the JNR lines. As the subtitle "From Birth to End" suggests, this book unravels the records of the Meiji period, which is considered the "mythical period," and explains that the numerous tank cars that reached their peak in the prewar Showa period, the Toki 900 series specialized for wartime transport during World War II, and the Chisa 1600 and Chi 500 series that were repurposed after the war were the last three-axle freight cars to be used in practice. It also provides a detailed introduction to rare models such as the Wasa 1 and Ku 9100, which made their final impact as prototypes during the high economic growth period.
In the end, three-axle freight cars were left behind by the times due to their inferior loading capacity and high-speed performance compared to bogie cars, but the author, a leading authority on freight car research, writes with love about the era in which they lived, their technical significance, and the circumstances that led to their downfall. This long-awaited book caused a great stir when it was published, and by 2003 it had gone through three printings, and now it is being republished.