Shimizusawa Station

Shimizusawa Station sits on the main road through the Shimizusawa district, a street-level building with boarded windows and a platform that has been empty since the Yubari branch line closed on 1 April 2019. The street sign above the adjacent intersection still reads 清水沢駅前, Station Front, a designation that now names a place rather than a function. The station was one of six stops on the 16.1 km Yubari branch line running between Shin-Yubari and Yubari. The line itself dates to 1892, when the Hokkaido Colliery and Railway Company opened it to move coal from the Yubari basin south to the port of Muroran. The railway was nationalised in 1906 and remained in operation through a century of coal booms, disasters, and eventual industry collapse. When Brett photographed Shimizusawa Station in 2016, the branch line was still running. Four single-car trains passed through each day. A small queue of taxis waited outside for passengers. The windows were already boarded, the building otherwise intact, sitting quietly while the rest of Shimizusawa emptied around it. Two years later, JR Hokkaido announced the line's closure, citing unsustainable operating costs against a population that had fallen from a peak of around 107,972 in 1960 to fewer than 10,000 by the time the decision was made. The line ran its last services in March 2019. The official closure took effect 1 April 2019, ending 127 years of rail connection to Yubari. The RESTA community complex, which opened in Shimizusawa the same year, incorporates a bus terminal as the replacement transport link. What the photograph records is the station in its last operational years: structurally present, functionally diminishing, the tracks beside the platform already beginning their return to grass and ground. The 清水沢駅前 sign overhead points to an address the trains no longer serve.