History
Nishi-Shibata Station in Shibata, Niigata Prefecture opened on 11 February 1957 (Japanese sources note an inauguration date of 1 April 1957 in the JA timeline) as an unstaffed stop on what is now JR East's Hakushin Line. It came under JR East with the privatisation of Japanese National Railways on 1 April 1987. For decades the station had only a single track with no passing loop, a major operational constraint; in October 2000 JR East and Shibata City jointly funded an approximately 800 million yen project that moved the station 200 metres toward Shibata and added a second track. Suica became available on 21 January 2006.
History summarized from Japanese & English Wikipedia · last reviewed 2026-05-18.