Shikoku Railway Company

The Shikoku Railway Company (Japanese: 四国旅客鉄道株式会社 Shikoku Ryokaku Tetsudō Kabushiki Kaisha), officially abbreviated as JR Shikoku (Japanese: JR四国 JR Shikoku), is the main subsidiary of the Japan Railways Group based on the island of Shikoku.
==History==
:Main article: Japan Railways Group
By the 1980s, the Japanese National Railways had become practically insolvent due to the decline of rail transport and fare increases failing to compensate for high labor costs. The Japanese National Railways was privatized and split into seven different companies on 1 April 1987, with the Japanese National Railway Settlement Corporation later formed to distribute the funds among the companies. JR Shikoku was formed from the previous JNR lines that ran in Shikoku. Unlike some of JR's other constituent companies, JR Shikoku remains under ownership of the state-affiliated Japan Railway Construction, Transport and Technology Agency.
Tsuguhiro Nishimaki is JR Shikoku's current president, having served in this role since 2020.
==Network==
JR Shikoku operates 853.7 km (530.5 mi) of railway lines; this makes it the smallest of the seven constituent companies of the Japan Railways Group. It is the only of the six passenger-carrying constituents which does not operate a Shinkansen line. Their headquarters are located in Takamatsu.
==Presidents==
Name 	Term start	Term end
Hiroatsu Itō 	1987 	1998
Toshiyuki Umewara 	1998 	2004
Kiyohiro Matsuda 	2004 	2010
Masafumi Izumi 	2010 	2016
Shinji Hani 	2016 	2020
Tsuguhiro Nishimaki	2020 	Active
==Trivia==
*JR Shikoku's slogan is Always Railways.
*JR Shikoku was the first of the seven main constituents of the JR Group to give station and line codes for easier reference for travelers.
*JR Shikoku is the only of the seven main constituents of the JR Group to not feature an image song. They however have a "beloved" song, titled Faraway Travelers. The song was composed by Kisaburō Suzuki and Takashi Nakahata. There is another "beloved" song titled Hero of the Blue Sky sung as a chant at baseball tournaments.
Category:Companies