History
Kii-Tanabe Station opened on 8 November 1932 on the Kisei West Line in Tanabe, Wakayama Prefecture, and became the main station of the city. It served as a wartime evacuation rail point in 1945 after machine-gun strafing damaged seven locomotives. With the privatization of Japanese National Railways on 1 April 1987 it came under JR West, and on 17 December 2016 ICOCA card support was added. The station consists of one side platform and one island platform serving three tracks, with a Midori no Madoguchi ticket office. A new three-storey station building incorporating tsunami-refuge capacity for around 300 people opened in 2019.
History summarized from Japanese & English Wikipedia · last reviewed 2026-05-22.
Notes
Until 2010 the last arrival at Kii-Tanabe was at 1:47 a.m.—then the latest scheduled non-night-train arrival of any station in Japan, a remnant of the old Tennōji–Shingū sleeper service.