History
Hashimoto opened on 11 April 1898 as the terminus of Kiwa Railway's new line from south of the Kinokawa. It became a through station on 25 November 1900 when the line was extended to Kokawa and on to Wakayama Station (now Kiwa Station). The Kiwa Railway was sold to Kansai Railway on 27 August 1904 and nationalised on 1 October 1907; the through line was named the Wakayama Line on 12 October 1909. From 11 March 1915 the Takano Tōzan Railway reached the station from Mikkaichichō, making this a joint state-railway/private terminus, and the private operator renamed itself the Ōsaka Takano Railway on 30 April. That operator merged into Nankai Railway on 6 September 1922, and the line was extended south through here to Kamuro on 1 November 1924. Wartime consolidation moved the Nankai assets to Kintetsu on 1 June 1944; they returned to the new Nankai Electric Railway on 1 June 1947. The station building was rebuilt in July 1959. JR West and Nankai succeeded JNR at privatisation on 1 April 1987. The Mikkaichichō–Hashimoto section of the Kōya Line was double-tracked on 30 August 1995; one-man operation south of Hashimoto began on 16 October 2005, Nankai PiTaPa on 1 July 2006, and the new elevated Nankai concourse with bridge step-free access on 1 March 2011. ICOCA was introduced on the JR side on 14 March 2020 and the Midori-no-Madoguchi was replaced by a Midori Plus ticket vending machine on 13–14 May 2021.
History summarized from Japanese & English Wikipedia · last reviewed 2026-05-22.
Notes
On 24 July 1945 a US warplane strafed the station, hitting a freight train standing at platform 2 and killing five people at the station and two more nearby. Bullet holes survived in the wooden wall of a storehouse below the footbridge until that footbridge was demolished in the 2010 step-free works; local volunteers preserved a section of the wall and a footbridge pillar stamped "Taishō 1 / Tetsudō-in / Tokyo Tsukishima Kikai Seizōsho", reassembled at the nearby Maruyama Park Jizō and dedicated at a memorial ceremony on 22 July 2011.