Timetable information
Weekday departures: 18/day · Sat & holiday departures: 18/day
First / last departure (weekday): 6:05 / 22:12
Busiest hour: 6:00–7:00 (2)
0:00 ─ 23:00
Figures are typical departures in the timetable data, not a live service count.
Timetable data as of 2 May 2026.
Adjacent stations
- Oito Line: Itoigawa ⇄ Kubiki-Ono
Location
History
Himekawa Station opened on 1 November 1986 on the Japanese National Railways Ōito Line in Itoigawa, Niigata, and is the most recently built station still operating on the line. It was a petitioned station: the City of Itoigawa paid the entire 13-million-yen construction cost so that people travelling to the new Himekawa Hospital, a large general hospital in a medically underserved area, would have rail access before the hospital opened. The unattended station passed to JR West on 1 April 1987 with the privatisation of JNR. Service was briefly suspended in November 2014 after the Nagano-Kamishiro Fault earthquake closed the line.
Notes
The hospital that justified building the station, Himekawa Hospital, went bankrupt in 2007 and the empty building still stands across National Route 148 from the platform.
Sources
- Wikipedia (English) (opens in a new tab)
- Wikipedia (日本語) (opens in a new tab)
- Photo: Toshinori baba at Japanese Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 3.0 (opens in a new tab) · Wikimedia Commons (opens in a new tab)
Last updated: 2026-05-18