Is it a car? Is it a train? No, it's UglyVan

"Dumpy" isn't a word we have much call to use, but there's none more appropriate to describe JR Hokkaido's Salamander 901 Dual Mode Vehicle, which takes all that's ungainly and squareish in bus and train design and amalgamates it into one great big yellow thing. To be fair, this is only a prototype, and its bus-with-bits-on looks derive from the fact that it is, in fact, a bus with bits on. The real thing, as envisaged by JR Hokkaido's crack team of Photoshop wizards, is considerably sleeker. As you will by now have guessed, it traverses either road or rail with equal ease, and is aimed at doing the sort of stuff you'd expect, like cutting down on the amount of hanging around involved in a morning commute, allowing JR Hokkaido to spend less money on laying down tracks, and so forth. Most of the regional JR companies aren't all that profitable, especially if they lack bullet trains and operate rural lines in places with minimal population density (e.g., Hokkaido).

[Via NIKKEI NET (Japanese)]