Japan’s railway industry is staring at a shortage of more than 20,000 workers by fiscal 2028. Recruiting and training enough people to keep the tracks, signals, and crossings in shape is already slipping, and the gap is only getting wider.
One company trying to get ahead of it is Nagoya-based Meiko Construction. In April it opened a huge training center in Kasugai, Aichi Prefecture. The site covers about 25,000 square meters and has full-scale tracks, signals, and crossings, so staff can practice maintenance without touching a live line. The build cost roughly ¥8 billion. Meiko does railway construction and maintenance, and it handles around 60% of track work on the Tokaido Shinkansen, so this isn’t a side project.
The old way of learning the job was simple and brutal: younger workers picked it up overnight, next to veterans, with the clock running until the first morning train. Staff shortages and tighter limits on working hours have made that harder to pull off. At the new center, trainees can repeat the same jobs without that deadline. That includes swapping rails that weigh more than a metric ton and making adjustments measured in millimeters. In one recent drill, 18 new employees finished a rail replacement in three hours.
The Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism has already found that about half of surveyed railway operators are running overtime or holiday shifts because they don’t have enough people. The projected shortfall is about 20,500 workers by fiscal 2028, and that number comes before any gains from better recruitment or productivity.
For Meiko, the center is a way to hang onto skills that still mostly live in people’s hands, and to get a new group of maintenance workers ready before the overnight crews run out of teachers.