History
Maibara Station opened on 1 July 1889 as a Japanese Government Railway station at the junction of what became the Tōkaidō Main Line and the route to Nagahama, immediately serving as a transfer point between rail and Lake Biwa steamships. The Ohmi Railway began service from the station on 4 July 1931. Maibara became the JR West/JR Central boundary station at privatisation on 1 April 1987, with in-station JR West and JR Central concourses still jointly operated alongside the Tōkaidō Shinkansen, which arrived on 1 October 1964. A new bridge-over station building opened on 21 March 2009 with full barrier-free access, and station numbering (JR-A12 for the Biwako Line; CA83 for JR Central) was introduced in March 2018.
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
When the Tōkaidō Shinkansen opened in 1964 Maibara was its only stop in a town rather than a city — the station sat in Maibara-machi until the municipality was upgraded to a city in 2005 — making it an unusual entry on the otherwise city-centric high-speed network.