Zuidbroek's station building is a type SS Hoogezand etc, one of the standardized rural station designs Karel Hendrik van Brederode produced in the 1860s for the Maatschappij tot Exploitatie van Staatsspoorwegen - the company that built and ran the new state railways. The brief was simple. A country station needed a ticket window, a waiting room, a small office, and quarters for the stationmaster, all in a building handsome enough to dignify the village it served but cheap enough to repeat dozens of times across a developing rail network. Van Brederode's solution was a brick two-story house with a steeply pitched roof and modest classical detailing, scaled to feel like a substantial village home rather than an industrial outpost. Zuidbroek's example was completed in 1865, three years before the first passenger trains actually arrived on the Harlingen-Nieuweschans line on 1 May 1868.

For a brief window in the early twentieth century, Zuidbroek was a real railway junction. The Stadskanaal-Zuidbroek branch opened on 1 August 1910, running south through Veendam to the peat town of Stadskanaal, 22 kilometers away. The Zuidbroek-Delfzijl branch had opened six months earlier, on 5 January 1910, running 26 kilometers north to the port city of Delfzijl through a small intermediate station called Zuidbroek Dorp. For a few years a village station of a few hundred souls sat at the meeting point of three lines, with trains heading northwest to the provincial capital, south into the peat country, and northeast to the North Sea harbors. Then the contraction began. The Delfzijl branch closed to passengers in 1934. The Stadskanaal branch ran longer but eventually closed too. Zuidbroek went back to being a stop on a straight east-west line.

What remains is more layout than traffic. At the station there are still four tracks and three platforms, two of them forming an island between the middle pair of tracks - the kind of infrastructure that gets built for a busy junction and lingers afterward. Platform 1 on the north side serves trains toward Groningen. Platform 2 on the north face of the island serves trains heading the other way, toward Bad Nieuweschans and Veendam. Platform 3 on the south side of the island is mostly there in case it is needed. The line through Zuidbroek is unelectrified, oriented west to east, and worked today by three local Arriva services and a single bus connection. None of which requires four tracks. The Veendam connection - run as a passenger service again since 2011 - is a partial revival of the old Stadskanaal branch, terminating at Veendam rather than continuing south.

In 2014 the Noord-Nederlands Trein & Tram Museum moved into the 1865 building. The museum is run by volunteers and focuses on the railway and tram history of the northern Netherlands - the very network whose contraction left Zuidbroek with more platforms than it needed. The exhibits sit inside Van Brederode's brick rooms while real Arriva trains pull up outside, a continuous loop of past and present meeting on the same platform. Zuidbroek itself is part of the municipality of Midden-Groningen, in flat farming country southeast of Groningen city. It is the kind of station that exists in railway atlases more than in travel itineraries, but the building has now been here for 161 years - longer than the Netherlands has been the modern Netherlands - and it shows no sign of going anywhere.