History
The station opened on 20 July 1928 as Funagoya Station, an added stop on the Japanese Government Railways Kagoshima Main Line. Freight handling ended in 1961 and parcel handling in 1971, by which point the stop was already unstaffed. Operation passed to JR Kyushu on 1 April 1987. When the Kyushu Shinkansen completed its Hakata - Shin-Yatsushiro section on 12 March 2011, the conventional station was relocated roughly 500 metres south to interchange with the new elevated Shinkansen platforms and was renamed Chikugo-Funagoya, while the former site was repurposed as a maintenance depot. SUGOCA IC card service had begun on 1 March 2009. Conventional station services were outsourced for over a decade until JR Kyushu resumed direct operation on 1 October 2023.
History summarized from Japanese & English Wikipedia · last reviewed 2026-05-22.
Notes
Although billed as a connecting Shinkansen interchange, the conventional and Shinkansen station buildings sit about 50 metres apart with no through-gate, requiring passengers to exit and re-enter between the two systems.