History
Kōriyama Station (Nara) opened on 27 December 1890 as a general station on the original Osaka Railway between Nara and Ōji. The line passed to the Kansai Railway in 1900 and was nationalised in 1907, becoming part of the Kansai Main Line on 12 October 1909. Freight handling ended on 1 March 1977 and parcel handling on 3 March 1986. At privatisation on 1 April 1987 the station passed to JR West, and the "Yamatoji Line" route nickname was introduced on 13 March 1988. The current overhead station building modelled on Kōriyama Castle opened on 27 February 1997. Automatic ticket gates followed in July 1998, ICOCA on 1 November 2003, station numbering (JR-Q34) in March 2018, and from the 16 March 2024 timetable revision the new commuter limited express "Rakuraku Yamato" began calling here.
History summarized from Japanese & English Wikipedia · last reviewed 2026-05-22.
Notes
Because Kōriyama is also the name of a station on the Tōhoku Main Line in Fukushima, freight and parcels were repeatedly misrouted; the railway agency proposed renaming this stop "Yamato-Kōriyama", but local residents produced Tōdai-ji documents arguing that the Yamato Kōriyama predated the northern one, and the name was preserved — tickets are still printed with the (関) Kansai prefix to disambiguate.