History
Minami-Horonobe Station opened on 1 November 1959 on the Japanese National Railways Soya Main Line as an unstaffed halt between Yasuushi and Kami-Horonobe, serving local diesel-railcar traffic. It passed to JR Hokkaido at the 1 April 1987 privatisation. In August 2016 JR Hokkaido proposed closing it together with Shimonuma and Nukanan, but Horonobe Town stepped in to fund maintenance, and from April 2021 the town took over management using furusato-nōzei donations. On 3 July 2024, faced with new repair costs for the station building, Horonobe Town notified JR Hokkaido it would not fund maintenance for fiscal 2025, and the station closed on the 15 March 2025 timetable revision.
History summarized from Japanese & English Wikipedia · last reviewed 2026-06-09.
Where the English and Japanese sources differ, this account follows the Japanese source.
Notes
To mark the station's 60th birthday in October 2019, Horonobe Town repainted the wooden shelter and added a portrait of its in-house mascot Minami Hororin-san to the exterior.