History
Ōmachi Station opened on 11 December 1919 as the Ōmachi Signal Office on what was then the Nagasaki Main Line in Fukumo, Ōmachi-machi, Kishima District, Saga Prefecture. It was renamed Ōmachi Signal Box on 1 April 1922 and upgraded to a full station on 1 September 1928 when passenger services began. Freight handling ended on 1 April 1973, parcel handling on 1 February 1984, and the station was made temporarily unstaffed on 20 January 1985. JNR's breakup on 1 April 1987 transferred operation to JR Kyushu. A directly-managed convenience store, 'Seikatsu Ressha', opened inside the station on 27 March 1994. A new station building was completed in 2008, smaller than the previous one. The station was unstaffed again from 14 March 2015. SUGOCA IC card service began on 3 October 2024. Ahead of the Nishi Kyushu Shinkansen opening, the Sasebo Line was double-tracked between Ōmachi and Takahashi from 27 February 2022 and Ōmachi became the single-/double-track transition point.
History summarized from Japanese & English Wikipedia · last reviewed 2026-05-22.
Notes
Ōmachi has an island platform serving two tracks and a siding off track 1, with the platform connected to the station building by a footbridge. National-rail-era 'Midori' limited expresses once briefly stopped here, but now only locals call. Because there is another Ōmachi Station on JR West's Kabe Line in Hiroshima, tickets to/from this station show '(佐世) 大町' to distinguish it. Most famously, from 1 April 1988 to 30 April 1989 Ōmachi was a 'dual starting station' of the longest one-way ticket in Japan together with Hizen-Shiraishi, because both Hizen-Yamaguchi - Ōmachi and Hizen-Yamaguchi - Hizen-Shiraishi were 5.1 km — the same distance — and each combination produced an equally long route ending at the opposite pole; the abolition of the Tenpoku Line on 1 May 1989 ended the dual-origin situation. Next to the station is the OOMACHI Information Plaza, where Class 9600 steam locomotive No. 29611 is preserved.