History
Tainose Station opened on 4 May 1898 as Iwase Station on the Kiwa Railway and was renamed Tainose on 15 January 1899. The line was sold to the Kansai Railway in 1904 and nationalised in 1907, becoming the Wakayama Line in 1909. Freight handling ended in 1963 and the station was made unstaffed in 1971. A shortcut line from Tainose to East Wakayama (now Wakayama) opened to freight in 1961 and to passengers in March 1972, replacing the older route through Kii-Nakanoshima as the main line. With the 1 April 1987 privatisation of Japanese National Railways the station passed to JR West. The 1898-era station building was removed in 2005, and ICOCA was introduced on 14 March 2020. The station sits 82.9 kilometres from the line's terminus at Ōji.
History summarized from Japanese & English Wikipedia · last reviewed 2026-06-09.
Notes
Tainose appears by name in verse 49 of the fifth volume of Ōwada Takeki's 1900 Tetsudō Shōka, just like Funato; the "Wakayama" mentioned alongside it in the lyric is the present-day Kiwa Station, not modern Wakayama Station.