History
Itami Station opened on 16 July 1920 as the terminus of the Hanshin Express Electric Railway (today's Hankyu) Itami Line, in Nishidai 1-chōme, Itami, Hyōgo. The original station — about 150 metres south-east of the current site, at today's Chūō 4-chōme — was a single ground-level island platform with two tracks and a westward siding. Elevation works began on 25 July 1967 and were completed on 9 November 1968, when the station was moved to its present site (the former Nippon Life ground) as a two-island, four-track elevated station, the second in Japan after Kita-Senri on the Senri Line to be equipped with automated ticket gates. The station building collapsed in the Great Hanshin Earthquake on 17 January 1995 — a Hyōgo Prefectural Police officer working in the building's koban was among the dead — and the line between Shin-Itami and Itami was cut. A temporary terminus opened 400 metres south on 11 March 1995. The new five-storey "Reita" station building was completed on 20 November 1998, with the station moving back onto its third floor the following day. Station numbering (HK-20) was introduced on 21 December 2013.
History summarized from Japanese & English Wikipedia · last reviewed 2026-05-22.
Notes
When the new "Reita" station was rebuilt after the earthquake, the ticket gates and platforms were placed on the same floor and linked by ramps — a barrier-free design decision that earned it a place in the first "Best 100 Stations in the Kinki Region". The original 1968 station had a fourth track left without rails as space for a planned line extension; that licence expired in 2005 with no extension built, and the rebuilt 1998 station was no longer designed to be extendable.