Shikanotani Station

Shikanotani Station sits on what was, for most of its life, the edge of a working railway city. The building is single-storey, the blue corrugated metal roof intact, a boarded window sitting left of the double doors behind a pale green metal railing. The JR logo remains visible above. By any measure, the building has been left to its own devices, even as the line kept running. What the photograph does not immediately announce is the building's history. Forty years before Brett visited in 2016, Shikanotani Station was Yubari's main railway terminus. The city's rail infrastructure moved with the population; the terminus was relocated three times across the Yubari branch line's long history, and this building, eventually renamed Shikanotani, was left behind each time as the network adjusted to meet a city in motion. The Yubari branch line itself dated to 1892, when Hokkaido Colliery and Railway Company opened the route from Oiwake to Yubari to shift coal to the port of Muroran. At the industry's peak in the 1950s, Yubari held over 100,000 residents and the railway was a working artery. The branch's six stations, Shin-Yubari, Numanosawa, Minami-Shimizusawa, Shimizusawa, Shikanotani, and Yubari, served a city built on coal and later on the hope that tourism might replace it. By August 2016, JR Hokkaido had already announced the branch line's closure. When Brett photographed the station that year, only a handful of trains passed through daily. The line closed officially on 1 April 2019, after 127 years of service. What the photograph records is the interval between announcement and closure, a building still standing on an operational line but already looking like a relic. The boarded window, the weathered frontage, the last few services a day: these are not the result of closure. They are what happens when the purpose drains out of a place before the place itself is formally finished.