A JR East E653-series taking a detour down the Ikea Line
Micro Ace, way back in 1995, started with North American prototypes, but by 1999 had abandoned them in favor of Japanese prototypes. Among the first Japanese models they released was the JR East E653 series. (Micro Ace maintains a pictorial history of releases online.) Even though I have heard these early models were not very good, I pined for one. 10 years after their production, though, and they have become quite rare. (Micro Ace typically only does one production run of a given model, then retires it immediately.)
But Micro Ace has lately begun to issue re-releases of older models, and this gave me hope. Continue reading…