History
Shinchi Station opened on 1897-11-10 as a Nippon Railway station on what is now the Jōban Line, in the town of Shinchi in Fukushima Prefecture. It was nationalised in 1906 and absorbed into the JR East network on 1987-04-01. On 2011-03-11 the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami completely destroyed the station, sweeping away a stopped local train and leaving only the platform and footbridge; thanks to two police officers who happened to be aboard, all forty-or-so passengers reached high ground unharmed. The station reopened on 2016-12-10 at a new inland site about 300 metres west, with two opposed side platforms in place of the prior three-platform layout.
History summarized from Japanese & English Wikipedia · last reviewed 2026-05-18.
Notes
When the tsunami struck, the standing local train had been delayed by an earlier lineside fire and was waiting for a safety check, so it was stopped at the platform rather than running through — a coincidence that made the police-led evacuation to high ground possible.