Hakone Tozan Line
railway line in Kanagawa prefecture, Japan
The Hakone Tozan Line (Japanese: 箱根登山鉄道線, Hepburn: Hakone Tozan Tetsudō-sen; lit. 'Hakone Mountain-Climbing Railroad Line') is a mountain railway in Kanagawa Prefecture, Japan. It is operated by Odakyu Hakone, an Odakyu Group company that also operates the Hakone Tozan Cable Car, Hakone Ropeway and Hakone Sightseeing Cruise.
Although presented as a single railway line, the Hakone Tozan Line operates as two distinct sections with different technical and operational characteristics. The lower section, between Odawara and Hakone-Yumoto stations, is operated exclusively by through trains of the Odakyū Odawara Line using conventional Japanese narrow-gauge rolling stock. The upper mountain section, between Hakone-Yumoto and Gōra station, is operated by Hakone Tozan Railway trains built to standard gauge and specially designed for steep gradients and sharp curves. Passengers must change trains at Hakone-Yumoto.
History
The origins of the Hakone Tozan Line date to October 1, 1888, when the Odawara Horse-drawn Railway opened a line from Kōzu Station via Odawara Station to Hakone-Yumoto Station. The operating company was renamed Odawara Electric Railway on October 31, 1896, and the line was electrified on March 21, 1900, operating as a tramway at 600 V DC.
Mountain railway operations began on June 1, 1919, when an electrified (600 V DC) line opened between Hakone-Yumoto and Gōra Station, enabling rail access deeper into the Hakone mountains. On December 16, 1920, the tramway section between Kōzu and Odawara was closed, with the line instead connecting to the Japanese Government Railways (now JR) Tōkaidō Main Line at Odawara. Hakone Tozan Railway was formally established as a company on August 16, 1928.
The public source identifies “Hakone Tozan Line” as railway line in Kanagawa prefecture, Japan. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Hakone, Tozan and Line.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 23, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1134480. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1888, 1896, 1900 and 1919.
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This entry incorporates text from “Hakone Tozan Line” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.