History
The station opened on 5 October 1914 as Kami-Ikutahara on the Railway Bureau's 762 mm-gauge Yūbetsu Light Railway, between Rubeshibe and Shimo-Ikutahara. The line was regauged to 1,067 mm on 7 November 1916, renamed the Yūbetsu Line in 1922, and absorbed into the Sekihoku Line in October that year; it became part of the Sekihoku Main Line on 1 April 1961. The station was renamed Ikutahara on 1 March 1946 once it had become the central station of Ikutahara village. JR Hokkaido inherited the station at privatisation on 1 April 1987, and the current concrete depot opened on 25 March 1993, sharing a building with the town library and an Okhotsk-region literature museum.
History summarized from Japanese & English Wikipedia · last reviewed 2026-05-18.
Notes
Until the locomotive era, Ikutahara hosted a turntable and water column to attach helper engines for the climb over Jōmon Pass; the depot today shares its building with the town library and an Okhotsk literature museum.