History
The first Niigata Station opened on 3 May 1904 in the former Ryūsakuba district of Nuttari, settling a long dispute between the city of Niigata and the town of Nuttari over the line's terminus. After the Manchurian Incident swelled traffic, a wooden second-generation building entered service in March 1935. Post-war planning relocated the station southwest in 1958 onto a former freight branch, uniting the Shin'etsu, Hakushin and Echigo lines at one site, and a third generation was completed in 1958. The 1964 Niigata earthquake damaged the building and toppled an adjoining footbridge. The Joetsu Shinkansen opened from here in 1982, and a long-running continuous-grade-separation project elevated the conventional platforms in stages by 2022.
History summarized from Japanese & English Wikipedia · last reviewed 2026-05-18.
Notes
During the 1897 station-siting dispute, members of the Niigata "Railway Comrades Association" detonated bombs at the Nuttari Station engine shed and a bridge on the Shinkurinokigawa river days before the line's 16 November opening, delaying the start of service by four days.