History
Sunagawa Station opened on 5 July 1891 with the Hokkaidō Colliery Railway's Sorachi Line from Iwamizawa to Sunagawa and on to Utashinai, planned by the company as the junction of its trunk line and the branch into the Sorachi coalfield. The provisional name 'Utashinai' was reassigned to the branch terminus, and Sunagawa became the central shipping point for coal from Utashinai and Kamisunagawa. It was nationalised in 1906, and the branch into Kamisunagawa was opened in 1918 and later became a Hakodate Main Line freight spur. The Utashinai Line closed in April 1988 and the Kamisunagawa branch followed in May 1994. JR Hokkaido inherited the station in 1987, and Kitaca became usable here on 16 March 2024.
History summarized from Japanese & English Wikipedia · last reviewed 2026-05-18.
Notes
Although the local name 'Sunagawa' is now applied to both station and city, the railway adopted it first: at the time the line was planned in 1889 the area was still generally called by the older Ainu-derived name Otashinai, and the municipality only became Sunagawa Village in 1903.