Kyoto Railway Museum

This guide to the Kyoto Railway Museum's roundhouse centers on locomotive C62-2, nicknamed the swallow angel, which began the war as a hulking black freight engine before being cut apart and rebuilt with bigger wheels for speed. You'll hear how that rebuild let it haul the Tsubame express between Tokyo and Osaka, and about the sister locomotive in its class that once set a speed record on Japan's narrow-gauge tracks. Listen for the sound of it inside the 1914 concrete roundhouse, the oldest of its kind still standing in the country.