Overview

The Sagano Line (E) is the name JR West has used since 1988 for the stretch of the San-in Main Line between Kyoto and Sonobe — 16 stations and 34.2 km, every one of them inside Kyoto Prefecture. Like most of JR West's Urban Network names it is a nickname laid over a longer railway, and here the two disagree about where to stop: the purple E symbol carries on far past Sonobe, all the way to Kinosaki-onsen, but station numbers were only ever issued for these sixteen. The line is double-tracked throughout except for the throat out of Kyoto Station, which is still single until the tracks pass under Omiya-dori — widening it would need either major land purchase or a wholesale rearrangement of the station, so it has stayed that way.

Along the route

The Sagano platforms are 31 to 33, tucked into the far northwest corner of Kyoto Station. Umekoji-Kyotonishi comes 1.7 km later, the newest station on the line: its number, E02, was published in 2018 as a deliberate hole in the sequence while the station was still a building site, and it opened into the gap a year later as the walk-up stop for the Kyoto Railway Museum and the aquarium. Then Tambaguchi, Nijo, Emmachi, Hanazono, Uzumasa, and Saga-Arashiyama, which was plain Saga until 1994 and is the stop for the bamboo groves. West of there the line is on a 1989 alignment of tunnels and river bridges, 1.6 km shorter than the single track it replaced; Hozukyo sits in the middle of it, on a bridge over the river between two tunnels, with almost no road access and the Kameoka–Kyoto city boundary running under its platform. The route it replaced was left in place and reopened in 1991 as the Sagano Scenic Railway. Past Umahori and Kameoka the line climbs out into the Tamba hills — Namikawa, Chiyokawa, Yagi, Yoshitomi, Sonobe.

Why play it

太秦 is the one everyone gets wrong. It is Uzumasa, from the ancient Hata clan settlement, and the characters offer a first-time reader no route to that at all. The signs add their own layer: JR West spells 丹波口 as Tambaguchi and 円町 as Emmachi, Hepburn's m before b and m, while the kana you actually type stay たんばぐち and えんまち. 保津峡 is ほづきょう, with a づ. And the line runs the full range of lengths in sixteen stops — やぎ is two kana, さがあらしやま is seven, and 梅小路京都西 is うめこうじきょうとにし, eleven kana for a station that has only existed since 2019.