History
Akabane Station opened on 1 March 1885 as a Nippon Railway ground-level station, serving as the junction where the Shinagawa Line — predecessor of today's Yamanote Line — branched off toward Shinagawa. It was nationalised on 1 November 1906 and assigned to the Tōhoku Main Line under the 1909 line-naming system. From 1978 onward construction for the Tōhoku Shinkansen forced the station's freight line to be reduced to single track, and a long quadruple-grade-separation project that began in 1990 progressively lifted the entire station onto viaducts. The viaduct elevation project was completed in April 1998, finally eliminating the local "kazu no fumikiri" level crossings that had plagued the surrounding streets for decades.
History summarized from Japanese & English Wikipedia · last reviewed 2026-06-09.
Notes
In April 1973, frustration with a JNR work-to-rule action that snarled rush-hour trains triggered the "Capital Region National Rail Riots", which began at Akabane and spread to Ueno and Shinjuku, paralysing JNR lines across the Tokyo region for two days.