History
Hatsudai Station opened on 11 June 1914 on the Keiō Electric Tramway as Kaiseibashi Station, named for the bridge over the Tamagawa aqueduct that ran alongside the line. It was renamed Hatsudai in September 1919. Under wartime land-transport rationalisation, the operator was absorbed into Tokyo Express Electric Railway on 31 May 1944, and the post-war breakup of that group in June 1948 brought Keiō Teito Electric Railway and the present station with it. A continuous grade-separation project moved the station underground on 7 June 1964. The 31 October 1978 Shinjuku–Sasazuka quadrupling shifted the platforms onto the new Keiō New Line tracks beneath Kōshū-kaidō; every train heading to Keiō-line Shinjuku has bypassed Hatsudai ever since. The station number KO02 was introduced on 22 February 2013, and ballet- and opera-themed approach melodies (Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker March, Sleeping Beauty waltz and Verdi's Aida triumphal march) were adopted in December 2015.
History summarized from Japanese & English Wikipedia · last reviewed 2026-05-18.
Notes
Hatsudai is built on two underground levels — the up-line on basement 2, the down-line on basement 3 — because the Shuto Expressway Route 4 viaduct piers run straight down the middle of National Route 20 above, leaving no room for a conventional side-by-side layout.