The Ginza Line was conceived by a businessman named Noritsugu Hayakawa, who visited London in 1914, saw the London Underground and concluded that Tokyo needed its own underground railway. He founded the Tokyo Underground Railway in 1920, and began construction in 1925.
The portion between Ueno and Asakusa was completed on December 30, 1927 and publicized as "the first underground railway in the Orient". Upon its opening, the line was so popular that passengers often had to wait more than two hours to ride a train for a five-minute trip.
On January 1, 1930, the subway was extended by 1.7 km to temporary Manseibashi Station, abandoned on November 21, 1931 when the subway reached Kanda, 500 meters further south down the line. The Great Depression slowed down construction, but the line finally reached its originally planned terminus of Shinbashi on June 21, 1934.
In 1938, the Tōkyō Rapid Railway a company tied to the predecessor of today's Tokyu Corporation, began service between Shibuya and Toranomon, later extended to Shinbashi in 1939. The two lines began through-service interoperation in 1939 and were formally merged as the Teito Rapid Transit Authority("Eidan Subway" or "TRTA") in July 1941.
The "Ginza Line" name was applied in 1953 to distinguish the line from the new Marunouchi Line. In the postwar economic boom, the Ginza Line became increasingly crowded. The new Hanzōmon Line began to relieve the Ginza Line's traffic in the 1980s, but the Ginza Line is still quite crowded as it serves major residential, commercial, and business districts in central Tokyo. According to a June 2009 Tokyo Metropolitan Bureau of Transportation survey, the Ginza Line is the seventh most crowded subway line in Tokyo, running at 168% capacity between Akasaka-Mitsuke and Tameike-Sannō stations.
THROWBACKTHISDAY; makes it 88 years and TBT Blog remembers.
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