History
Biei Station opened on 1 September 1899 when the Hokkaido Government Railway's Tokachi Line reached the town from Asahikawa, becoming a through station that November as the line was extended to Kami-Furano. Successive route renamings made it part of the Kushiro Line in 1909 and the Furano Line in 1913. The present station building, completed on 30 January 1952, is an unusual single-storey stone structure of Biei tuff designed by Susumu Nitta of JNR's Asahikawa Regional Architectural Office; the town funded 1.13 million of its 4.04 million yen cost. Freight and parcel handling ended in 1982 and 1984, and at the 1987 JNR privatisation the station passed to JR Hokkaido. Operations were contracted out to JR-Service Net Hokkaido on 1 April 2024.
History summarized from Japanese & English Wikipedia · last reviewed 2026-05-18.
Notes
Biei's 1952 station building is one of the few stone railway depots built in the JNR era; about 3,400 sai of locally quarried Biei tuff went into its walls, and the surrounding town later adopted a building code requiring nearby façades to use the same stone.