Kurihara Den'en Railway Line
railway line in Japan
The Kurihara Den'en Railway Line (くりはら田園鉄道線, Kurihara Den'en Tetsudō sen) was a rural rail line in Miyagi Prefecture, Japan, abandoned on March 31, 2007. Running from Ishikoshi Station in Tome, Miyagi with a connection to the Tōhoku Main Line, extending westward to inland Hosokura Mine Park Mae Station in Kurihara, along central Kurihara. This line used to be called Kuriden (栗電 or くりでん) for short because the preceding name of the operator was the Kurihara Electric Railway (栗原電鉄, Kurihara Dentetsu).
The line was initially constructed to transport ore from Uguisuzawa's Hosokura Mine (細倉鉱山, Hosokura Kōzan) which was closed in 1988.
Infrastructure
The operator introduced diesel multiple units (DMU) during the reorganization in 1995, but the old 750 V DC electric installation remained for economic reasons. It was one of few railways then in Japan that operated with an obsolete semaphore signal system and non-automatic blocking system.
Operation and service
All trains consisted of a single car without a conductor. The fare was twice as high as comparable distances on Japan Railways lines. Only three of the sixteen stations, namely Wakayanagi, Sawabe, Kurikoma were regularly staffed.
History
Originally the line was 762 mm (2 ft 6 in) gauged, constructed by Kurihara Tramway (栗原軌道, Kurihara Kidō) and opened in 1921, later renamed to Kurihara Railway (栗原鉄道, Kurihara Tetsudō) in 1941 and again to Kurihara Dentetsu in 1955.
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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 Aug 6, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q6446016. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2007, 1988, 1995 and 1921.
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This entry incorporates text from “Kurihara Den'en Railway 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.