History
Ugo-Iwaya Station opened on 16 October 1922 as a station on the Japanese Government Railways' Rikuusai Line, serving Iwaya village in what is now Yurihonjō, Akita Prefecture. It was transferred to the Uetsu Main Line on 20 April 1924. Freight handling ended in October 1971, parcel service in October 1981 when the station was made unstaffed and simply contracted, and operation passed to JR East with the 1987 privatisation of Japanese National Railways. The current joint station building, which also houses offices and a PR space for the former town of Ōuchi's chamber of commerce, opened in March 2000. On 18 March 2023 the simple-contract sales arrangement with Yurihonjō City was discontinued and the station became permanently unstaffed.
History summarized from Japanese & English Wikipedia · last reviewed 2026-05-18.
Notes
In July 1971 a steam locomotive hauling 30 freight cars failed to climb the gradient toward Oriwatari and rolled backwards roughly 1.8 km toward Ugo-Iwaya before stopping.