Trains for kids in Tokyo: museums, front seats & a first Shinkansen

For a train-obsessed kid, Tokyo is the greatest city on earth, and the brilliant part is that most of the joy is nearly free. Between museums, front-row driverless rides and platform spotting, you can fill days on the network itself before you spend a yen on a theme park. Here's how we'd build it.

The railway museums

The Railway Museum in Omiya is the big one: a hall of real locomotives, driving simulators and a working timetable of hands-on exhibits that easily fills a day. It's a short hop out of central Tokyo and, conveniently, a good excuse for a first bullet-train ride. Closer in, the Tokyo Metro Museum in Kasai is a smaller, cheaper delight for younger kids, with a subway simulator and cutaway trains. Fans of sleek limited-express trains should add the Romancecar Museum in Ebina, dedicated to Odakyu's iconic Romancecars.

Rides where the front seat is the whole point

You don't need a museum to thrill a train kid. The Yurikamome is a driverless elevated line to Odaiba — grab the very front seats and your child effectively 'drives' out over Tokyo Bay. The Yamanote Line loop is a cheap, air-conditioned circuit of the city that doubles as a rainy-day activity and a nap opportunity. For something more special, the Odakyu Romancecar's front-row limited-express seats out of Shinjuku toward Hakone give a windscreen view, and further afield the Enoden seaside ride near Kamakura and the SL Taiju steam train up in the Nikko area are proper day-trip highlights.

• Yurikamome front seats to Odaiba — the driver's-eye view kids beg to repeat.
• Yamanote Line loop — a full circuit for the price of one short fare.
• Odakyu Romancecar front row — book the very front for the windscreen view.

Shinkansen: watching, then riding

Before you ride one, spend an hour Shinkansen watching at Tokyo Station, where kids can spot the green Hayabusa, red Komachi and, if they're lucky, the rare Doctor Yellow inspection train. Then make the first ride itself the event. Easy, short bullet-train day trips include Tokyo to Omiya (pairing perfectly with The Railway Museum), Tokyo to Odawara or Atami for seaside and onsen, Utsunomiya for gyoza, and Karuizawa for cool highland air. Any of these gives kids the reserved-seat, platform-bento, tunnel-whoosh Shinkansen experience without a long haul.