History
Yamakita Station, on the JR Central Gotemba Line in Yamakita, Kanagawa, opened on 1 February 1889 as a stop on the government railway's Kōzu–Shizuoka line. The Gotemba route's 25-permille gradients required bank engines, and Yamakita developed as a depot town for assembling, fuelling, and watering these locomotives. The station became part of the newly defined Tōkaidō Main Line on 12 October 1909, but with the 1934 opening of the Tanna Tunnel the through Tōkaidō traffic moved to the Atami route and Yamakita was redesignated a Gotemba Line station on 1 December 1934. The Yamakita locomotive depot was abolished on 15 May 1943 and the line was singled in July of that year. Electrification arrived on 27 April 1968, freight ended in March 1979 and parcels in February 1984, the station passed to JR Central on 1 April 1987, and TOICA service began on 2 March 2019.
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
After the station was unstaffed in March 2012, the town arranged for the local NPO Jōcho-yutaka-na-machizukuri to resume ticket sales that May; without a Marusu terminal, it only sells pre-printed 120-mm tickets to the destinations the prior survey had identified as most-used.