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Comment by AlexAplin | Hacker News Reader

JR East is already in the process of eliminating departure melodies as they transition to one-man station operations, so these will unfortunately be gone sooner than later. The Nambu and Joban lines got rid of them last year and it looks like the Yamanote is scheduled for them to be gone by 2030 [1].

I'm sure they can figure out a way to trigger custom melodies with RFID or similar eventually. Keikyu figured out how to recreate their departure boards [2]. JR might be less willing to come up with something immediately given the optics around automating someone out of a job.

[1] https://japantoday.com/category/features/travel/jr-east-axes...

[2] https://soranews24.com/2026/07/04/japanese-train-company-bri...

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"trains on the Nambu Line have been operated by a team of two staff members, a driver up front and a conductor in the back [...] It turns out that in order to play the station-specific departure melodies, someone has to press an actual button located on the platform, and this has been part of the conductor’s responsibilities"

Ha, thank you for surfacing this.

I want to retire and have this be my job

They might be able to find a few retired-aged people locally, should they keep the non-automated version.

The news articles are real, but the Nambu line brought their departure melodies back played from the cars themselves late in 2025.

I should have specified I meant the custom melodies. My understanding was that they're now all generic. https://sheets.works/the-bells-of-tokyo is a good reference for the transition.

The site you cited is AI slop.

I hope they can find a way to keep them, it would certainly garner a lot of goodwill. Not like people will stop taking their trains because the melodies are gone, though...

For the digital flipboard on the Keikyu line, it's nice they did it, but I wish they would add a bit more perspective to the flippy parts. Right now it looks like a horizontal scanline just moving down the signs to reveal the next station name underneath.

I think I'd be 2% less likely to visit japan without the melodies. I love those things.

No, it is impossible to keep them. Computers are not that far advanced yet. The melodies can only be played by pressing a button located at the end of the train.

My line lost its departure melodies in March this year :/

We should get our top frontier models on the task. Perhaps they can devise a motorized finger contraption to push the button without human intervention.

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