The is a railway line in

Fukushima Prefecture Fukushima Prefecture (; ja, 福島県, Fukushima-ken, ) is a prefecture of Japan located in the Tōhoku region of Honshu. Fukushima Prefecture has a population of 1,810,286 () and has a geographic area of . Fukushima Prefecture borders Miya ...

Japan Japan ( ja, 日本, or , and formally , ''Nihonkoku'') is an island country in East Asia. It is situated in the northwest Pacific Ocean, and is bordered on the west by the Sea of Japan, while extending from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north ...

operated by

East Japan Railway Company The is a major passenger railway company in Japan and is the largest of the seven Japan Railways Group companies. The company name is officially abbreviated as JR-EAST or JR East in English, and as in Japanese. The company's headquarters are ...

(JR East). It connects Iwaki Station in Iwaki and Kōriyama Station in

Kōriyama is a city in Fukushima Prefecture, Japan. , the city has an estimated population of 322,996 people in 141760 households, and a population density of 430 persons per km2. The total area of the city is . Kōriyama is designated as a core city and ...

. The name "Ban'etsu" is taken from the first

characters Character or Characters may refer to: Arts, entertainment, and media Literature * ''Character'' (novel), a 1936 Dutch novel by Ferdinand Bordewijk * ''Characters'' (Theophrastus), a classical Greek set of character sketches attributed to The ...

of the names of the ancient

provinces A province is almost always an administrative division within a country or state. The term derives from the ancient Roman ''provincia'', which was the major territorial and administrative unit of the Roman Empire's territorial possessions outsi ...

of and , which the Ban'etsu East and Ban'etsu West lines connect. means "east" in Japanese. The line's nickname is the , taken from the Abukuma River that flows nearby.

Service

All trains are operated as local services in 2-, 3-, or 5-car formations. Service between Kōriyama and Ononiimachi is provided once every 30 minutes to two hours, but between Ononiimachi and Iwaki, there is a period of five hours where no trains operate. One reason for the few continuous services between Iwaki and Kōriyama is the opening of the parallel

Ban-etsu Expressway The is a national expressway in the Tōhoku region of Japan. It is owned and operated by East Nippon Expressway Company. Naming The name is a kanji acronym consisting of characters found in the former names of the provinces linked by the expr ...

in 1995; as a result, most long distance passengers use highway bus services. The last express service, ''Iwaki'', stopped running in 1982. During peak holiday periods such as Golden Week,

Obon or just is fusion of the ancient Japanese belief in ancestral spirits and a Japanese Buddhist custom to honor the spirits of one's ancestors. This Buddhist–Confucian custom has evolved into a family reunion holiday during which people retu ...

, and

New Year New Year is the time or day currently at which a new calendar year begins and the calendar's year count increments by one. Many cultures celebrate the event in some manner. In the Gregorian calendar, the most widely used calendar system to ...

, the rapid ''Abukuma'' makes a single round trip with a 2-car train.

Station list

*All stations are located in

. * Trains can pass one another at stations marked "◇", "∨", or "∧". Trains cannot pass at stations marked "｜".

Rolling stock

As of February 2009, the following rolling stock is used on the East Ban'etsu Line. * KiHa 110 series DMUs

History

The line was planned by the

Railway Construction Act The was promulgated by the Diet of Japan on June 21, 1892, and designated government support for a network of thirty-three railway lines covering most of Japan, with the exception of Hokkaidō. On April 11, 1922, the Diet amended the law to add an ...

in 1892. The

Japanese Government Railways The Japanese Government Railways (JGR) was the national railway system directly operated by the Japanese Ministry of Railways ( ja, 鉄道省, Tetsudō-shō, ) until 1949. It was a predecessor of Japanese National Railways and the later Japan Rai ...

opened the first section as the between Koriyama and Miharu in 1914. The Iwaki - Ogawagō opened in 1915 as the , the same year Miharu - Ononiimachi section opened. When the two sections were connected in 1917, the line became the Ban'etsu East Line. Freight services ceased in 1987.

References

External links

Stations of the Ban'etsu East Line
(JR East) {{DEFAULTSORT:Banetsu East Line Lines of East Japan Railway Company Rail transport in Fukushima Prefecture 1067 mm gauge railways in Japan Railway lines opened in 1915