History
Kobayashi Station opened on 1 October 1912 (Taishō 1) as Kobayashimachi Station. On 22 April 1913 (Taishō 2) the Fukukawa Lumber Company received a licence to build a 3.04-mile narrow-gauge industrial siding to its mill. The station was renamed Kobayashi on 1 March 1951 (Shōwa 26), and with the JNR breakup on 1 April 1987 (Shōwa 62) it passed to JR Kyūshū. A new station building and a north-south free passage opened on 15 March 2015 (Heisei 27). On 1 October 2023 (Reiwa 5) the outsourcing to JR Kyūshū Service Support ended and the station became a direct JR Kyūshū-managed station. Kobayashi is the main station of Kobayashi City and the only intermediate staffed station on the Kitto Line.
History summarized from Japanese & English Wikipedia · last reviewed 2026-05-22.
Notes
Because JR East has a Kobayashi Station with the same name (on the Narita Line in Chiba), tickets to this station are sometimes printed with the prefix "(吉)小林" — abbreviating Kitto Line. From 2014 onward the station precinct was redeveloped, and after the new south-side building opened in 2015 the old wooden building on the north was demolished — its site became "KITTO Kobayashi," a city tourist and cultural exchange centre that opened on 31 July 2017 (Heisei 29). On 1 August 2017 Miyazaki Kōtsū moved its in-city bus hub here from the former Kobayashi Bus Centre. There is also a brief celebrity item: Dump Matsumoto served as one-day stationmaster here on her pre-retirement tour, and a photo from that day appeared on an orange card issued by JR Kyūshū's Kagoshima Branch.