Efforts are underway to restore an abandoned freight car mover that was used until some 40 years ago to carry firebricks at a brick factory in the major ceramics production town of Tajimi, Gifu Prefecture.
Kobei Kato, 72, the seventh-generation master of local pottery Kobei-gama and a rail fan who had kept the car mover, has been working since spring with Masahiro Sasada, 46, a dermatologist and a railway writer from Koka, Shiga Prefecture, to restore the machine so it can be put on display as an artefact of industrial heritage.
The car mover is a C2-type vehicle that had been used on a siding at a factory run by TYK Corp., a refractory manufacturer in Tajimi.