History
Kushiro Station opened on 1 March 1959 as an infill stop on the JNR San'in Main Line between Hashi and Shimokōfu, in what is today the city of Hamada, Shimane Prefecture. The station opened unstaffed and has remained so; only local trains call. With the privatisation of Japanese National Railways on 1 April 1987 it passed to JR West. The station sits 465.6 kilometres from Kyoto on a single side platform high above the surrounding settlement, accessed directly from a small entrance at the Izumo end of the platform. Through the era of locomotive-hauled passenger trains, some scheduled services skipped the station because their carriages exceeded the platform's usable length — a quirk that persisted until full DMU operation in March 1992.
History summarized from Japanese & English Wikipedia · last reviewed 2026-05-18.
Notes
Until full diesel-railcar operation took over in March 1992, some scheduled local trains were obliged to pass through Kushiro without stopping because their locomotive-hauled carriages overran the short platform.