The Kowloon–Canton Railway's British Section opened in 1910, threading north from Kowloon through the New Territories toward the border with China. Tai Po Kau was one of the original stations, positioned where the line ran close to Tolo Harbour — then still called Tai Po Hoi — and near enough to a pier to make transfers practical. Before roads could carry trucks reliably into the northern New Territories, the combination of rail and sea passage was the main freight artery. Tai Po Kau sat at that junction, which made it more significant than its modest size suggested. The station building itself reflected a considered architectural sensibility: traditional Chinese architecture, not the utilitarian brick sheds that a purely functional railway might have built. The KCR's stations in this era were built to fit their setting.

The station's name caused persistent confusion. It was originally signed simply as Tai Po — that was the nearest recognizable place — but the opening of a new Tai Po Market station eventually required the older station to adopt a more specific identity. From 1966 onward it went by Tai Po Kau, reflecting the village name of its immediate surroundings rather than the broader district. By then the railway had already lost some of its freight role to trucks and roads, and the pier was less central to daily life than it had been decades earlier. The station kept serving passengers — commuters, students, villagers going to market — through the late decades of the KCR's original configuration. It closed in 1983, part of a wider reorganization as the railway modernized and its southern terminus shifted.

The station building did not survive the 1990s. The KCR Corporation cleared the site and built staff housing in its place — a residential development called Trackside Villas, which takes its name from the railway that once ran past the front door. A shuttle bus connects Trackside Villas to Tai Po Market station, a transit link that quietly acknowledges the loss: where passengers once boarded a train, they now board a bus to reach the train. The architecture of traditional Chinese design that once marked the platform is gone. What remains is a residential block and the name, which at least keeps the station's memory present for anyone who asks where it came from.

The Kowloon–Canton Railway remade the New Territories when it opened. Villages that previously faced inward — oriented toward farmland and the sea — gained connections to Kowloon and, through Kowloon, to the wider British imperial network. Tai Po Kau's combination of rail station and adjacent pier made it a genuine node in that network for the first half of the twentieth century. By the time the station closed, Hong Kong had been transformed — new towns, highways, and mass transit had redrawn the map of the New Territories entirely. Tai Po Kau station had been superseded by the very modernity its own railway helped create. The site today sits inside a changed landscape: the nature reserve on the hillside above, the housing estate where the platform stood, and the forest creeping down toward both.