History
Himekawa Station opened on 1 November 1986 on the Japanese National Railways Ōito Line in Itoigawa, Niigata, and is the most recently built station still operating on the line. It was a petitioned station: the City of Itoigawa paid the entire 13-million-yen construction cost so that visitors and outpatients of the new Himekawa General Hospital, which served a medically underserved area, would have rail access before the hospital opened. The unattended station passed to JR West on 1 April 1987 with the privatisation of JNR. Service was briefly suspended in November 2014 after the Nagano-Kamishiro Fault earthquake closed the line.
History summarized from Japanese & English Wikipedia · last reviewed 2026-05-18.
Notes
The hospital that justified building the station, Himekawa Hospital, went bankrupt in 2007 and the empty building still stands across National Route 148 from the platform.