Rakurakuen

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

Rakurakuen Station traces back to a temporary stop, 'Shiohama Beach Front', opened in August 1935 on the Miyajima Line, whose Kusatsu-machi–Hatsukaichi-machi section had opened in 1924 with Suminohama as a nearby intermediate station; on 1 December 1935 the temporary stop was replaced by a permanent Shiohama Station, and on the same day Suminohama was abolished. The station was renamed Rakurakuen on 8 September 1936, the day Hiroden's predecessor Hiroshima Gas Electric Tramway opened the Rakurakuen amusement park as a traffic-generator for the line — one of the era's many private-rail-park combinations. The park was long one of Hiroshima's premier amusement parks, but shifting tastes and competing facilities cost it custom and it closed on 31 August 1971. The station had been renamed Rakurakuen-yuenchi ('Rakurakuen Amusement Park') on 20 July 1965 to emphasise the connection, but was restored to Rakurakuen on 1 September 1971, the day after closure. Subsequent dates: platform improvements on 31 January 1981; the station building completed on 31 March 1986 after the original station building burned down in February 1980; over-the-counter ticket sales at the commuter-pass window ended in April 2004. Today the station is a 2-platform/2-track ground-level stop with the two platforms offset diagonally from one another, the down-side platform housing the station building and a commuter-pass window operated by Hiroden Miyajima Garden. Station number M29.

Rakurakuen began life as Shiohama in 1935, but Hiroden's predecessor built an amusement park next to the station the following year — promoted as a park you could reach 'easily (rakuraku) by tram' — and changed the station's name to Rakurakuen to match, Hiroshima's own version of the railway-and-amusement-park pairing that was a hallmark of pre-war private-rail marketing in Japan. The park outlasted the war but closed in 1971; the station dropped the 'yuenchi' suffix and reverted to Rakurakuen the day after closure, and 'Rakurakuen' lives on today as the surrounding place-name as well.