History
Ōkawara Station opened on 11 November 1897 as a general station of the Kansai Railway when the Ueno (today's Iga-Ueno) – Kamo section was inaugurated, in Kakegahara, Kita-Ōkawara, Minamiyamashiro-mura, Sōraku-gun, Kyoto. The Kansai Railway was nationalised on 1 October 1907 and the line was re-designated the Kansai Main Line under the line-name regulations of 12 October 1909. On 15 August 1953 the station building was washed away in the Minami-Yamashiro flood (Tamamizu Station was lost on the same day); the building was rebuilt on 31 March 1954. Freight handling ceased on 1 August 1970, and parcel handling was withdrawn and the station became unstaffed on 1 May 1983. At the privatisation of Japanese National Railways on 1 April 1987 the station passed to JR West. ICOCA IC card use began on 13 March 2021, and on 1 July 2021 the Kameyama Railway Sub-Bureau was abolished — train crews going to Kameyama Operations Section, the depot to the Kyoto Depot's Kameyama Outpost of the JR West Suita General Rolling-Stock Works, and the dispatching to Kameyama Control Office.
History summarized from Japanese & English Wikipedia · last reviewed 2026-05-22.
Notes
The eleventh stanza of Volume 5 of the Railway Song (Tetsudō Shōka, Kansai/Sangū/Nankai book) by Tōki Ōwada, published in 1900, mentions the Kizugawa Bridge between Ōkawara and Kasagi — although today no obvious large rocks remain on the Kizu River bed near the station.