Musashi-Sakai Station (武蔵境駅) is in Musashino, Tokyo. East Japan Railway Company (JR East) runs the Chūō Line (Rapid) platforms, and Seibu Railway runs the Tamagawa Line platform. The station opened on 11 April 1889.
History
The station opened on 11 April 1889 as Sakai Station (境駅), when the Kōbu Railway, the forerunner of the Chūō Line, opened between Shinjuku and Tachikawa. The Kōbu Railway was nationalised on 1 October 1906. On 12 October 1909 the station was assigned to the Chūō East Line, and on 22 October 1917 the Tama Railway, now the Tamagawa Line, opened here. On 1 July 1919 the station was renamed Musashi-Sakai to avoid a duplicate name. Two other stations also called Sakai were renamed on the same day.
A private siding to the Sakai water purification plant was laid around 1921 and was used to move materials. Freight handling at the station ended on 1 September 1967. Japanese National Railways was formed on 1 June 1949. Luggage handling ended on 14 March 1985. Freight handling resumed on 31 March 1987, for vehicles only, with no regular freight trains. On 1 April 1987, national rail was split up, and the station passed to JR East and the Japan Freight Railway Company (JR Freight).
The elevated rebuild of the station took place from 2004 to 2009. On 7 November 2004, separate gates were set up for Seibu and JR East. Because the Seibu side began in a temporary building, it was staffed at first. The Tamagawa Line platforms moved onto the elevated structure on 8 December 2006. PASMO became usable at the Seibu gates on 18 March 2007, first through manual gates. The down Chūō Line was switched to the elevated track on 30 June 2007, and a new south gate opened the same day. Automatic gates were installed on the Tamagawa Line on 29 March 2008, and its second platform was completed on 19 July 2008. The up Chūō Line was switched to the elevated track on 5 December 2009, which completed the elevated work apart from the station building.
The station's gates and passages were changed over several years. A north-south free passage opened and the JR gates were combined on 25 March 2012. Suica became usable at JR East on 18 November 2001. Station staff at JR East were outsourced from 1 April 2013. A new exit, nonowa-guchi, opened on 9 May 2013 ahead of the nonowa Musashi-Sakai shopping facility, which opened on 29 May 2013. A second shopping facility, nonowa EAST, opened on 10 June 2016. A transfer-only gate between the Chūō Line and the Tamagawa Line was set up on 7 September 2022.
Shops and services at the station changed. A self-checkout NewDays store without staff opened on 30 July 2019. A booth-style office for remote work opened on 2 February 2022, and the Emio shopping area under the Tamagawa Line elevated tracks opened on 29 August 2022. Midori no Madoguchi ticket counters closed on 31 August 2023, and a talk-to-staff reserved seat ticket machine was installed on 1 September 2023. The nonowa EAST building closed on 31 March 2026. Smart platform doors started on platforms one and two on 10 April 2026.
See all 33 dated events in the Data view →
Written by an AI from this station's own sourced facts (the dated events in the Data view), nothing else, and checked by a program for dates and numbers that are not in those facts. It can still be wrong. Found a mistake? . Adapted from Japanese Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0; this text is shared under the same licence.