We pulled into Hitoyoshi after an hour to find the next train waiting for us.
Now, you don't take a heritage train and give it a full restoration and then run it through a setting that won't attract a clientele, and this section of track, as was the case with the next one, was obviously being niche marketed as a trip for train freaks.
If the prelude was bloody magnificent, these next two stages were absolutely stunning. Given the niche marketing bit, there were stops guaranteed to maximize that appeal, the first at a heritage station that came just before a switchback and a loop up into the mountains and a stop some five or six minutes later that had you looking back at the station you'd just visited.
I stayed on board for that one, but The Photographer, as you'd expect didn't. Her report, once back on board, had Hughesy alighting at every subsequent stop.
There was one at a place whose name translates as Eternal Happiness, where you struck a bell according to you relative deep grebe of absolute contentment. One for merely happy, two for very happy, three for verging on the ecstatic.
Another was the oldest station in Kyushu, though how that worked when you're in the uplands in the centre of the island didn't quite compute.
There was a stop at Yatake station, which dates back to 1909, where an impressive locomotive was stabled in a largish shed beside a stall selling fresh merchandise (Madam invested in some freshly dried mushrooms). In front of the locomotive the train's hostess was holding a train-driver's cap and a board bearing the date, a handy combo for photographic purposes, and offering to take the photo for you.
There was af air bit of that sort of silliness along the way and it was difficult to abstain from involvement.
On a more serious note, since the track was following the route that brought the first trains to Kagoshima, there had obviously been a fair bit of logging and land clearing along the route, and in the most recently cleared areas there seemed to be a significant spread of invasive vines and creepers and other weeds that made the foreground, on frequent occasions along the journey, an eyesore.
Whether the forests will eventually overrun the invaders is, of course, one of those only time will tell scenarios.
When the weeds took over the foreground, of course, the natural response was to lift up the eyes to the magnificent backdrop.