History
Hamamatsu Station opened on 1 September 1888 as the terminus of the Railway Bureau's line from Hamamatsu to Ōbu. On 16 April 1889 the line was extended westward to Shizuoka and the station became an intermediate stop. The track-name decree of 1 April 1895 placed the station on the Tōkaidō Line (renamed Tōkaidō Main Line in 1909). A second-generation Western-style station building opened on 12 December 1926 but was destroyed in the Hamamatsu air raid on 10 June 1945; a wooden two-storey third-generation building followed on 15 October 1948. The Tōkaidō Shinkansen opened on 1 October 1964 with Hamamatsu as a transfer point, initially connected to the conventional-line platforms by overpass. Shinkansen platforms were extended to 16-car length on 15 March 1970, most freight handling was moved to the new Nishi-Hamamatsu Station on 26 April 1971, and all freight handling ended on 1 October 1976. The conventional-line elevation was completed on 15 October 1979, unifying the platforms with the Shinkansen tracks. Hikari trains began stopping on 1 October 1980. With the privatisation of Japanese National Railways on 1 April 1987 the station passed to JR Central. The station building "MayOne" opened on 1 May 1988. Automatic ticket gates were installed on the conventional-line concourse on 14 November 1992 and on the Shinkansen concourse on 7 March 1998. The TOICA IC card came into service on 1 March 2008.
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
From 1949 to 1953 Hamamatsu was the boundary where electric locomotives from Tokyo were swapped for steam locomotives heading west, and the long stopovers spawned a station tradition: platform radio gymnastics for passenger refreshment, and from 1951 the famous "Hamonika Musume" (Harmonica Girls) — young women who hawked harmonicas made by Nippon Gakki (now Yamaha) from the platform. Although the locomotive swap ended when electrification reached Nagoya in July 1953, the Harmonica Girls remained a station fixture until 1969 and were featured in songs and films of the period.