December 7, 1949: 4 years after the bomb, the Catholic archbishop of Nagasaki holds Mass in the ruins of St. Mary's Cathedral.
A fun well maybe more morbid story about the Hiroshima an Nagasaki bombs I learned in school was this - in less than 24 hours after the bombs had fell the Japanese Civil Rail authority had repaired the rail network enough to run mainline trains into within the city limits to enable evacuation of survivors an aid to flow in.
They didn't do this by taking other services off line, by ripping up track from smaller lines they just had the stockpiled capability to do it not once but twice in short order, during war time facing an enemy who was systematically destroying said infrastructure with conventional weapons let alone the Atomic Bomb.
Supposedly part of them having the Rail to hand was they reserved it to make Tank Traps from, and the sleepers (ties for the Americans) as a source for easily constructed defensive works, but it's the Locomotive and Rolling stock is more impressive, During WW2 the Alies perfected the art of killing infrastructure not just the big things but the little things where they are more vulnerable - this includes things like Rail Yards for passenger trains outside of service hours, specific types of maintinance facillities that while seemingly unimportant in location where main resource drains to maintain but had to be kept up because of there connectivity etc.
Let alone the skilled crew to operate them, until VERY recently trains required a minimum a crew of two an the bigger the trian an the longer the distance or heavyer the load you needed more, and this is a skill that doesn't scale well for the most part - a guy running a light rail system for the army or navy might have 20 years experience and be a expert but put him on the foot pate of a large mainline engine it would be like going from a gocart to a f1 racing car over night.
Its fucking wild they where able to do that in nearly every single respect, and hats off to them they did it an kept the network running at nearly peace time levels of service, even when allowing for war damage slips - they did a fucking amazingly good job.
