History
Bushū-Nakagawa Station opened on 15 March 1930 on the Chichibu Railway's Chichibu Main Line. The name is taken from Nakagawa Village, which existed in 1930 but was merged out of existence with Shirakawa Village in 1943 under the wartime municipal-merger law. A short incline tramway connecting the station to a limestone works was built around 1941, and a freight platform stood on the south side. Freight handling stopped on 20 January 1984, taking the incline with it, and the surviving track was dismantled in 1986. The station kept its entrusted-halt status under Chichibu Station's management until PASMO IC was introduced on 12 March 2022, when it became unstaffed.
History summarized from Japanese & English Wikipedia · last reviewed 2026-05-18.
Notes
The 1941 lime-works incline that once ran south of the station was a 680 m, 4-percent-grade, 508 mm-gauge double-track section with single-track ends, powered first by draught animals and then converted to electric haulage during the war; cars were hand-pushed at each end onto an endless-rope hauling system in the middle.