When the Alford Valley Railway was built between 1856 and 1859, the engineers had to drive a mile-long cutting thirty feet deep through particularly hard Aberdeenshire granite, just west of Tillyfourie, to reach the summit of the line at 618 feet above sea level. The line then dropped down into Alford. It was a sixteen-mile branch with stations at Kemnay, Monymusk, Tillyfourie, Whitehouse and Alford, and the whole journey took the train just over an hour. The railway also served Kemnay Quarry and three other granite quarries in the area, because the granite that made Aberdeen the Granite City had to get to Aberdeen somehow, and a branch railway was the answer. By law, until 1883, the third class fare on one train a day could not exceed a penny per mile.

The Great North of Scotland Railway was incorporated into the London and North Eastern Railway in the 1923 grouping, when the British state rationalised over a hundred small railway companies into four big ones. In 1948 the LNER itself was nationalised and the Alford branch became part of the Scottish Region of British Railways. By then, the writing was on the wall for rural branch lines across Britain. Cars, lorries and buses were taking the traffic the railways had once carried, and the Beeching cuts of the 1960s would finish off most of what survived the 1950s closures. The Alford branch went earlier than most: passengers in 1949, freight in 1965. The original granite station building at Alford was demolished after British Rail closed the line.

In 1979, a proposal surfaced to build a narrow gauge tourist line on the site, using salvaged equipment from the New Pitsligo peat moss railway, an industrial line in Aberdeenshire that had carried peat from the moss to a processing plant. The peat railway had no further use for its locomotives and rolling stock. The Alford volunteers had no money to buy new ones. The deal made itself. The narrow gauge railway opened in 1980, originally running about three kilometres from Haughton Park station through Murray Park Woods. In 1984 the line was rerouted to run from Alford station itself, alongside Alford Golf Course, to Haughton Park about 1.35 kilometres away. The original Murray Woods line then closed.

The Alford Valley Railway closed in 2017, and for six years the rails sat unused while the small group that had kept the line going wound up its affairs. In some heritage railway closures that would have been the end. The track would have come up, the locomotives sold off, and the site cleared for housing. Alford did not let that happen. A new organisation, the Alford Valley Community Railway, formed with the explicit intention of bringing the line back. They held meetings. They raised money. They restored the equipment that had been sitting under tarpaulins. In August 2023 the line reopened to passengers, six years almost to the month after it had closed. Children rode the trains again.

The current station building sits on the site of the original granite structure, but the passenger platform is the original 1859 article, the actual stones where Victorian travellers once waited for the up train to Kintore. A small railway museum is housed in the station building. To the west, the granite carriage shed of the original railway is now used by the Alford Valley Railway, a working piece of mid-nineteenth-century industrial architecture that has been continuously employed for railway purposes since the 1850s. The Grampian Transport Museum and the Alford Heritage Museum are immediate neighbours, all three forming a small but unusually dense cluster of transport heritage in the upper Don valley.