Hino (Shiga)

History

Hino Station (Ohmi Railway station number OR32) opened on 1 October 1900 with the inauguration of the Yōkaichi–Hino section of the Ohmi Railway Main Line, in Uchiike, Hino-chō, Gamō-gun, Shiga. The line was extended to Kibukawa on 28 December 1900, making Hino a through-station. The station building was rebuilt in 1916 to install a passing loop, with about 57% of the cost contributed by local residents and the necessary land donated to Ohmi Railway by the local village. Between 1986 and 1996 the Yōkaichi–Kibukawa section ran LE-Car railbuses, with a railbus depot, fuelling and watering facilities installed in the Hino yard; high maintenance costs and inadequate capacity caused the service to be discontinued in 1996. After about a century the station building was considered for demolition, but Hino-chō declared it a town treasure and raised about 73 million yen through municipal budget, hometown-tax donations and crowdfunding, completing earthquake reinforcement and conversion in 2017: ticketing reopened on 1 August 2017 and a new tourism centre with a café, "Nanairo", opened on 1 October 2017. The 1965 wooden waiting shelter on the up platform was rebuilt and reopened on 28 February 2019, and a small railway-history exhibit (the Hino Eki Railway Museum) opened on 31 May 2020. The station was scheduled to become fully unstaffed on 1 March 2026.

History summarized from Japanese & English Wikipedia · last reviewed 2026-05-22.

Notes

Hino's wooden station building, long thought to date from 1900, was actually rebuilt in 1916 to install a passing loop; it remains one of Japan's oldest still-active private-railway station buildings. By comparison, Nankai's Hamadera-kōen building (1907), retired in 2016, had previously been considered the oldest such structure in Japan.