History
Otaru-Chikkō Station (number S13) is on the JR Hokkaido Hakodate Main Line in Otaru, Hokkaido. It opened on 21 November 1910 as a station of the Japanese Government Railways between Otaru (now Minami-Otaru) and Asari — its very name reflects its origin as a logistics base for the construction of Otaru Port — and grew into a major freight yard and engine depot in the JNR era before being rebuilt as a passenger station after freight handling ceased on 1 November 1986; the present third-generation building, designed jointly with Danish State Railways (DSB), entered service on 26 February 1999. The site lies in Otaru, the lone city of the Shiribeshi Subprefecture in western Hokkaido and historically the prefecture's second-largest city: per Otaru's Wikipedia article it was developed by the Meiji government as a coal-export port and was the terminus of Hokkaido's first railway (Temiya–Sapporo, 1880), and at its 1920 peak was Hokkaido's second-most populous city, sometimes called "the trading port second only to Kobe and Yokohama".
History summarized from Japanese & English Wikipedia · last reviewed 2026-05-25.
Notes
The Otaru article notes a striking architectural detail of the new station building: the rebuilt third-generation Otaru-Chikkō Station was designed jointly with Danish State Railways (with which JR Hokkaido has a sister-railway agreement), and of its 1.3 billion yen total cost the city of Otaru itself contributed 700 million yen — an unusually heavy municipal share for a JR station.