Originally Posted by
armagebedar
Railway lines, no matter where in the world you are, are rarely profitable in and of themselves.
Tokyo is a different animal, though. It must be the combination of traffic density and the fact that most lines were built for damnear free back before most of the area was urbanized.
At any rate, the railway operations of JR East are profitable even when you strip out the retailing and real estate operations. The same Toyo Keizai issue noted that the Tokaido Main Line alone (the commuter line, not the shinkansen) has an operating profit of over $1 billion per year, and the JR East shinkansen lines together pull in over $2 billion net per year.
For kicks, I just took a glance at Tokyu and Seibu's respective IR sites, and for both companies, the transportation segment is a bigger contributor to the bottom line than their much larger (in revenue terms) ancillary operations.
I also recall reading somewhere that the Tokyo Monorail (now part of JR) has been running in the black for a very long time.