Tokyo DisneySea Tour - Part 9, Outside the Park
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Tokyo DisneySea Station
As is the case with the other three stations of the Disney Resort Line, every effort has been made at DisneySea Station to ensure that guests can move as quickly and easily as possible to and from the station's platform.  There were concerns.  Massive influxes of people hit the stations at park opening and closing.  It was the feeling that the Line's automated trains could handle the passenger load (which so far they seem to without problem), but it was felt that the weak link could end up being the stations.   Guest would have to make their way relatively quickly through them or the system would bog down.

To ensure the smooth flow of foot traffic into and out of the stations, stairways, passages, and platforms were designed excessively wide.  This is especially apparent at the massive DisneySea and Resort Gateway (Ikspiari) stations, which bear?? the brunt of the roughly 60% of guests who are expected to arrive at the park by train.  For example, the platforms of these two station are nearly double the size of those found at even the busiest Japan Railway (JR) stations.  The attitude was "better safe than sorry" and no expense was spared to ensure the smooth flow of people.  The cautious attitude was made much more so by the location of this resort - urban Japan, where trains are far and away the leading form of transportation.  Virtually every Tokyo Disney Resort guest is so familiar with train travel that they virtually fly through even the most crowded and cramped stations.

Guests' experience is primarily with JR, and JR was the closely followed model.  It's ticket distribution and entry systems work.  More importantly, people are extremely familiar with them.  A rethinking would have very likely been a serious mistake.  The JR model was followed so closely that I didn't realize it initially.  When I took that first early morning trip on the Resort Line, I just bought a ticket and walked over to the entry gate, inserted the ticket and passed through, walked to an escalator and took it to the platform... then I realized that I hadn't given any thought to what I'd just done... because I'd done exactly the same thing a thousand times before... at JR stations.

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Here comes Liner Yellow.  (Simple fact is, the word "monorail" is very difficult for a native Japanese speaker to say.)
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Each car of the Resort Line's six trains features a case like this one which display rare memorabilia, some of it dating back to the earliest days of Disney animation.
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