Mansfield helped pioneer railways in the East Midlands. The Mansfield and Pinxton Railway opened in 1819 as a horse-drawn plateway, more than two decades before the era of mainline passenger steam, and was eventually absorbed into the newly formed Midland Railway. A proper passenger line from Nottingham to Mansfield followed in 1849, but the engineering was rough by later standards. The Derby Mercury of 24 October 1849, just weeks after services began, reported tartly that engines have been off the line in the station yard at Mansfield several times since the opening on Tuesday week. The curves here are so sharp that a small engine can scarcely pull a train of four or five carriages out of the yard. On Sunday morning last as the train due in at nine a.m. was coming in, the engine went off the rails, and it took upwards of half an hour to get it on again. Surely some alterations will be made to prevent future accidents. Alterations duly followed. In September 1850 fares were cut in half and passenger numbers promptly doubled.

The present station building opened on Friday 1 March 1872, built by the contractor C. Humphreys for the Midland Railway, with two platforms and a principal entrance from Queen Street running parallel to the viaduct. The accommodation in the new building reflected nineteenth-century class anxieties precisely. The down platform contained the booking hall with oak floors, a Ladies' first-class waiting room, a Gentlemen's first-class waiting room, a Ladies' second-class waiting room (gentlemen, presumably, were expected to manage), and the booking and parcels offices. There was a fish house at one end and a carriage and horse dock at the other. The up platform had a boiler room to heat foot warmers for the longer journeys, another Ladies' waiting room, and the stationmaster's office. The down platform was 105 yards long and the up platform 67 yards longer to accommodate the Southwell branch trains. The opening of the new station coincided with engineer John Crossley's deviation of 1.25 miles of track between Sutton and Mansfield, eliminating three sharp curves, the worst of them at King's Mill. The new alignment included four bridges and a viaduct over the Hermitage Reservoir.

British Railways closed Mansfield Town Station to passengers in 1964, part of the Beeching cuts that severed thousands of small and medium British towns from the rail network. Goods traffic continued until 1984, when the old Portland Wharf goods yard on Station Street was converted into a Co-op food store. For three decades, the only railway in Mansfield was the wind through the empty platforms. The town's nearest passenger station was Alfreton, six miles away, which between 1973 and 1995 was renamed Alfreton and Mansfield Parkway to encourage rail use from a town that could not see its own former station. Plans to re-establish a service were debated through the 1980s, with a brief proposal for an entirely new station at Toothill Lane in the town centre before the council decided to refurbish the original 1872 building instead. Mansfield District Council began the restoration work in February 1994.

On 20 November 1995 the Robin Hood Line reopened with through services from Nottingham to Mansfield Woodhouse, and Mansfield rejoined the British passenger railway network after thirty-one years of absence. The line was later extended to Worksop. Today the station is managed by East Midlands Railway, with hourly services to Nottingham, the historic 1872 building functioning as the booking office, and the Midland Hotel still standing immediately adjacent. The hotel began life as an early-nineteenth-century mental asylum called Broom House before the Midland Railway Company bought it in 1862 and converted it. A small Nottinghamshire Mining Museum now occupies part of the station building, documenting the coal industry that once made Mansfield a railway town worth saving in the first place. In 2011 a new bus interchange was built immediately next door and connected to the station by a sky bridge, completing the public-transport reunion that started in 1995.