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, trade name , is a Japanese private railway company that provides commuter and interurban service to the northern Kansai region. It is one of the flagship properties of Hankyu Hanshin Holdings Inc., in turn part of the Hankyu Hanshin Toho Group (which includes H2O Retailing Corporation and Toho Co., the creator of Godzilla). The railway's main terminal is at Umeda Station in Osaka. The signature color of Hankyu cars is maroon.
The Hankyu network serves 1,950,000 people every weekday and offers several types of express service with no extra charge.
The head offices of Hankyu Hanshin Holdings, Inc. and Hankyu Corporation are at 1-16-1, Shibata, Kita-ku, Osaka; both companies' registered headquarters are at Ikeda Station, 1-1, Sakaemachi, Ikeda, Osaka Prefecture.
The Takarazuka Revue, an all-female musical theatre performance company, is well known as a division of the Hankyu railway company; all of its members are employed by Hankyu.
Keihanshin refers to the area served by Hankyu trains, comprising the cities of 京都, 大阪 and 神戸, along with the suburbs that connect them to each other.
Kyūko means "express train(s)".
On July 16, 1920, the Kobe Main Line from Jūsō to Kobe (later, renamed Kamitsutsui) and the Itami Line from Tsukaguchi to Itami were opened.
On April 1, 1936, the Kobe Main Line was extended from Nishi-Nada (present-day Ōji-kōen) to the new terminal in Kobe (present-day Kobe-Sannomiya Station), and the Kobe Main Line from Nishi-Nada to Kamitsutsui was named the Kamitsutsui Line, which was abandoned on May 20, 1940.
In 1936, Hankyu established a professional baseball team and in 1937 the Nishinomiya Stadium as the team's home field was completed near Nishinomiya-Kitaguchi Station. The Hankyu Braves (named in 1947) played until the 1988 season and became the predecessors of the present-day Orix Buffaloes.
On December 1, 1949, the Keihan Main Line, the Katano Line, the Uji Line, the Keishin Line, and the Ishiyama-Sakamoto Line were split off to become part of the newly established Keihan Electric Railway Co., Ltd. Although this revived the former Keihan Electric Railway, Keihan was now smaller than before the 1943 merger, because the Shinkeihan Line and its branches were not given up by Keihanshin. The present structure of the Hankyu network with the three main lines was fixed by this transaction. The abbreviation of Keihanshin Kyūkō Railway was changed from "Keihanshin" to "Hankyū".
On December 6, 1969, the Kyoto Main Line and the Senri Line started through service to the Osaka Municipal Subway Sakaisuji Line. In 1970, the Senri Line was one of access routes to the Expo '70 held in Senri area.
On April 1, 1973, Keihanshin Kyūkō Railway Company assumed its current name.
On April 1, 2005, former Hankyu Corporation became a holding company and was renamed Hankyū Hōrudhingusu Kabushiki-gaisha. The railway business was ceded to a subsidiary, now named Hankyu Corporation (before the restructuring, the new company which reused a dormant company founded on December 7, 1989, was called 株式会社アクトシステムズ until March 28, 2004, then 阪急電鉄分割準備株式会社 from the next day).
On October 1, 2006, Hankyu Holdings became the wholly owning parent company of Hanshin Electric Railway Co., Ltd. and the holdings were renamed Hankyu Hanshin Holdings, Inc.. Hankyu's stock purchase of Hanshin shares was completed on June 20, 2006.
The three groups of the lines, the Kobe Lines, the Takarazuka Lines and the Kyoto Lines, can be further grouped into two, the Kobe-Takarazuka Lines and the Kyoto Lines from a historical reason. Hankyu has two groups of rolling stock, one for the Kobe-Takarazuka Lines and the other for the Kyoto Lines.
Some former Hankyu trains, such as the 2000 series and 3100 series, have been transferred to the Nose Electric Railway.
| +Current and historical Hankyu Railway fares !rowspan=2 | Distance !colspan="3" | Fare (in JPY), effective |
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The fare rate was changed on April 1, 2014, to reflect the change in the rate of consumption tax from 5% to 8%, and again on October 1, 2019, from 8% to 10%.
Hankyu trains appear in the Japanese animated series The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya.
In the 1999 film, 10 Things I Hate About You, the character Bianca Stratford, played by Larisa Oleynik, is seen wearing a shirt reading “阪急 電車” translating to Hankyu Railway. This can be seen at 1:27:23 in the film.
One 2008 book by the Japanese writer Hiro Arikawa, , occurs entirely on the Hankyu–Imazu line, in the north-west suburbs of Osaka, where various characters meet and interact in the trains and at the various stations of the line. It was made into a film in 2011, titled .
The Hankyu 2000 is the locomotive of choice for Takumi Fujiwara, the main character in Densha de D, a parody of Initial D where the main characters race with trains instead of cars.
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