History
Kashiwabara Station opened on 21 February 1900 on the Imperial Government Railways Tōkaidō Line, between Sekigahara and what is now Ōmi-Nagaoka, when a new lower-gradient alignment replaced the original 1883 route that had threaded the mountains via Fukaya to Nagahama. The original line, with its 25-permille continuous climb between Sekigahara and Fukaya, had become a notorious bottleneck; the easier-graded replacement opened in October 1899 and was the basis for the new station here. Freight handling ended on 16 September 1960, parcel handling on 1 February 1984, and on 1 April 1987 the station passed to JR Central at the JNR privatisation. A JR all-line ticket window opened in March 1993, and TOICA IC cards became usable 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
Kashiwabara Station lies about a kilometre from the Gifu border, making it the easternmost JR station in Shiga Prefecture and indeed in the entire Kinki region's two metropolitan prefectures and four prefectures; in the steam-locomotive era when limited expresses Tsubame and Hato ran here, station staff were required to report each train's passing time directly to the JNR head office.