History
Nihon Rhine Imawatari Station opened as Imawatari Station on 24 April 1925 as the terminus of the Meitetsu Imawatari Line (now part of the Hiromi Line) and served as the gateway to Nihon Rhine river cruises along the Kiso. Freight services ended in 1961, and the station was renamed Nihon Rhine Imawatari on 10 November 1969. The original wooden depot was dismantled in 1974 and moved to the Meiji Mura open-air museum in Inuyama. A second station building with a commercial annex opened on 26 January 1977. The current third-generation building was completed on 21 September 2006 and the station was de-staffed under centralised remote management. Manaca IC fares became usable on 11 February 2011.
History summarized from Japanese & English Wikipedia · last reviewed 2026-06-09.
Where the English and Japanese sources differ, this account follows the Japanese source.
Notes
The 1925 original station building survives at the Meiji Mura open-air museum in Inuyama, where it serves as the Tokyo Station for the museum's preserved steam locomotive.