History
Arai Station opened on 15 August 1886 as a Japanese government railway stop on the newly built Naoetsu-to-Sekiyama section that became the Shinetsu Main Line; freight handling began five days later. The station serves the centre of what is now Myōkō, Niigata. A concrete station building replaced earlier wood structures in 1962, paid for in part by Arai City through a railway construction bond. Upon the 1987 privatisation of JNR it passed to JR East and JR Freight. On 14 March 2015, with the Hokuriku Shinkansen extended to Kanazawa, the parallel Shinetsu Main Line was transferred to the third-sector Echigo Tokimeki Railway, which now operates Arai on the Myōkō Haneuma Line.
History summarized from Japanese & English Wikipedia · last reviewed 2026-05-18.
Notes
To distinguish it from the unrelated Nii Station on the Bantan Line in Hyōgo (both written 新井駅), tickets here used to be marked "(Shin)-Arai" before the 2015 third-sector transfer.