The Agricultural Light Railway: A Community Lifeline
The Japanese government promoted migration from other parts of the country to Hokkaido beginning in the 1860s, but the lack of infrastructure made it difficult for people to inhabit inland areas of the island. Even in the 1920s, the National Railway from Sapporo only serviced eastern Hokkaido’s coastal towns, and the inland roads were often dirt tracks, impassable in adverse weather conditions.
To open the inland areas of eastern Hokkaido, the government built the Agricultural Light Railway, with narrow gauge tracks to reduce costs. The first of these rail lines opened in 1924 from Attoko Station, east of Kushiro, to Nakashibetsu farther inland. Horse-drawn vehicles ran on the tracks, but as the volume of traffic increased, they were replaced with gasoline-powered locomotives.
These trains were lifelines for frontier settlements, transporting people to Kushiro and crops and dairy products to market—even serving as an ambulance when needed. At a time when many households in the area had no electricity and no telephone, people went to the nearest railway office to make phone calls. Because of the narrow gauge of the rails, the train sometimes tipped over in snowy conditions, and community members would band together to pull it upright again.
Diesel engines were introduced after World War II, but the trains were still single cars, much like trams. In the 1960s many of the small rail lines had been converted to roads. By 1972 only a few railway routes remained open in eastern and northern Hokkaido, as the lines that had played such an important part in the development of the region were successively removed or abandoned. Remnants of these lines can still be found in the area’s fields and forests, and some of the old railway cars have been preserved in Tsurui Village north of Kushiro and at Okuyukiusu Station, a former station in the town of Betsukai east of Kushiro.