Ōfunato Line
railway line in Japan
The Ōfunato Line (大船渡線, Ōfunato-sen) is a local railway line in Iwate Prefecture, Japan, operated by the East Japan Railway Company (JR East). It originally connected Ichinoseki Station in Ichinoseki to Sakari Station in Ōfunato, on the Tohoku coast.
The eastern section of the line was significantly damaged by the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami on 11 March 2011. In January 2012, services resumed on the western 62.0 km (38.5 mi) portion of the route between Ichinoseki and Kesennuma. The eastern section between Kesennuma and Sakari remains closed, and in February 2012, JR East officially proposed that this section of the line be scrapped and the right-of-way used as a bus rapid transit (BRT) route. The section was routinely replaced by BRT, and this section of the line was formally closed as a railway on 1 April 2020.
The line connects with the Kesennuma Line at Kesennuma Station and formerly connected with the privately owned Sanriku Railway's Minami-Riasu Line at Sakari Station in Ōfunato.
History
The Ichinoseki – Kesennuma section opened in stages between 1925 and 1929, with the Kesennuma – Sakari section opening between 1932 and 1935.
Freight services ceased in 1983/4.
Following the 2011 disaster, services resumed on the Ichinoseki – Kesennuma section on 1 April, but were suspended again between 7–18 April due to aftershocks.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Ōfunato Line” as railway line in Japan. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 8, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1057758. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2011, 2012, 2020 and 1925.
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This entry incorporates text from “Ōfunato 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.