Brighton's rail history dates to the October 27, 1856 opening of the Grand Trunk line from Montréal to Toronto. The current-day Maplewood Street was Railroad Street, agriculture was slowly displacing forestry as the primary local industry and communities long reliant on water transport were eagerly awaiting the rails as a means of access to larger markets.^[1]

In its heyday, the Brighton GTR station was a group of seven buildings and a stock yard; there was a freight shed, two private coal sheds, a 35 foot (11 m) wooden water tank and large piles of lumber (GTR's steam trains originally burned wood). The station itself is a "Type C" second-class wayside station, much like those still in rail service in Napanee and Port Hope; a single-story building with five door or window arches on the sides and two arches on each end.^[1] Most of these were built from limestone to a standard GTR design with a stone chimney on each of four corners; the Brighton station differs from the others in its use of brick.^[2] The original chimneys are now gone.

The railway allowed fruit to be canned in Brighton and transported to ocean ports for shipment overseas; it transported Brighton dairy products to market in Toronto and, in summer, brought thousands of passengers to Presqu'ile Provincial Park, which became an Ontario provincial park in 1922. At the time of the outbreak of the Great War in 1914, an era when there were only fifty motorcars in the village, a second railway came to town: the Canadian Pacific Railway. A fledgling third national railway, the Canadian Northern (CNoR), completed a line from Quebec to British Columbia in 1915.