History
Matsukawa Station opened on 15 December 1887 when the Nippon Railway extended its main line from Kōriyama to Shiogama. It was nationalised in November 1906 and was placed on the Tōhoku Main Line when the route-naming scheme took effect in October 1909. From 1 March 1926 to 14 May 1972 the station was the western terminus of the Kawamata Line to Iwaki-Kawamata. The Matsukawa incident, an unsolved train sabotage in which crew members died, occurred about three kilometres north of the station on 17 August 1949. Control passed to JR East at the JNR breakup on 1 April 1987, Suica acceptance began on 14 March 2009, and a new station building opened on 20 March 2015.
History summarized from Japanese & English Wikipedia · last reviewed 2026-05-22.
Notes
A memorial to the locomotive crewmen killed in the August 1949 Matsukawa derailment was erected near the station on 21 March 1950, while the unsolved sabotage case ground its way through fourteen years of trials.