History
Soeda Station opened on 1 April 1915 as Kami-Soeda Station, the southern terminus of the Kokura Railway from Higashi-Kokura. It was renamed Hikosan-guchi around 1933, then nationalised and given its present name on 1 August 1942, when the Tagawa Line was extended through Soeda. The connecting Soeda Line, separated in 1960, was abandoned in April 1985. JR Kyushu took over at JNR privatisation on 1 April 1987 and a new station building opened in March 1988. Rail service south of Soeda has been suspended since the July 2017 Northern Kyushu floods; the gap was filled by the Hitahikosan Line BRT on 28 August 2023, whose buses now share the platform face for cross-mode transfers.
History summarized from Japanese & English Wikipedia · last reviewed 2026-05-22.
Notes
The original 1942 alignment had to place the Hitahikosan Line platforms a hundred metres from the station building because the existing Soeda Line tracks and freight sidings already occupied the centre of the yard — leaving the entrance and the trains awkwardly separated until the 2023 BRT-conversion rebuild.