Nobeyama

Departure data for this station is not available on this site.

Nobeyama Station opened on 29 November 1935 with the completion of the Ministry of Railways' Koumi Line between Kiyosato and Shinano-Kawakami, in the village of Minamimaki, Nagano Prefecture. On 25 April 1960 it became the highest ordinary-railway station in Japan when the Kusakaru Electric Railway's Kokkyōdaira Station (1,371 m) closed. The current third-generation station building was completed in March 1983, and at the privatisation of Japanese National Railways on 1 April 1987 the station came under JR East. Its original 1935 building was a celebrated streamlined-vault design in the architectural fashion of the day — old rails used as reinforcement under a lath-and-mortar shell — but the shell-only, no-tile vault leaked and cracked from early on and lasted barely 15 years before being replaced with an ordinary wooden structure in 1948.

At 1,345.67 m above sea level, Nobeyama is the highest station in Japan operated by the JR Group, and the highest among Japan's ordinary (non-cable, non-ropeway) railways; the JR Group's highest point on the rails, 1,375 m, lies about 2.3 km away toward neighbouring Kiyosato. Counting funiculars and aerial ropeways, higher stations exist — Kurobedaira (1,828 m) and Senjōjiki (2,612 m).