The railway reached Bruges on 12 August 1838, and the inaugural train carried King Leopold I and Queen Louise-Marie. The line ran from Ghent to Bruges, passing right through the medieval walls and stopping at 't Zand, the broad open square inside the old city. A few weeks later a second line opened westward to Ostend, connecting Bruges to the North Sea coast for the first time by rail. For six years the trains came and went with no real station building - passengers waited in the open or in temporary shelters. Then in 1844, the architect Auguste Payen built a proper station house on 't Zand. By the standards of mid-century Belgium, this was a serious piece of civic architecture. By the standards of Bruges's growing passenger volumes, it was already too small.

By 1879 the original building had to go, and Bruges did something only Belgium could really do: rather than demolish it, the city offered the dismantled building to Ronse, eighty kilometers south, which needed a railway station of its own. Workers numbered the stones, loaded them, and rebuilt them in their new home. Somewhere in the process the orientation was lost. The Ronse station stands today with its main facade aimed at the tracks instead of the town - architecturally elegant for arriving travellers, architecturally baffling for everyone else. Back in Bruges, Joseph Schadde designed a replacement station that opened in 1886 on the same 't Zand square. It was bigger, busier, and stylistically very late nineteenth century, with high gables and decorative ironwork.

By 1910 it was clear that a railway running through the historic core of Bruges was going to choke the medieval city forever. Engineers began surveying a new alignment that would loop around the southern edge of the old walls, leaving the inner city for pedestrians and cyclists. Then the First World War began and the work stopped. Decades passed. Construction finally resumed in the late 1920s and the new alignment was completed in 1936. The current station building, designed by the brothers Josse and Maurice Van Kriekinge in the modernist International Style, opened in 1939. The 1886 Schadde station was left behind on 't Zand, derelict, all through the Second World War. It was finally demolished in 1948, more than a decade after the trains had stopped calling there.

Today Brugge station is the tenth-busiest in the country - and given how small Bruges itself is, that ranking says everything about how many day-trippers come for the canals and the chocolate shops. A renovation that began in 2004 widened the passenger tunnel beneath the platforms by twelve meters and added escalators and lifts; the work finished in May 2009. Behind the station an underground garage holds 800 cars and a thousand bicycles - this is Flanders, after all. Intercity trains thread Brugge into a national web that reaches Brussels, Antwerp, Liege, and the Belgian Airport, while local services run north to the port at Zeebrugge. Between 1998 and 2015 a daily Thalys high-speed train tied Brugge directly to Paris in under three hours, until the route was finally cut for lack of business. The trains here are not glamorous. They simply work, the way Belgian railways have for nearly two centuries.