The terminus of the Glasgow South Western Line in the W of Dumfries and Galloway, Stranraer Railway Station (known in Gaelic as An t-Sròn Reamhar) is located on a pier, a quarter-mile (0.5 km) north of the town centre. Also known as Stranraer Harbour Railway Station, this station was built in 1862 to service ferries for Northern Ireland, as a short branch off the Portpatrick Railway. The main station was Stranraer Town, which opened the previous year. Services to Portpatrick ended in 1950 and Stranraer Town became the end of the line, but it closed in 1966. Freight services continued to use the sidings here on route to the ferry into the 1990s, but the goods depot formally closed in 2009 and the sidings have now been lifted. Stranraer Harbour is now the only station in the town, and the 'Harbour' was dropped in 1996 as the ferry services started operating to Cairnryan rather than Stranraer. The last ferry service moved in 2011, with rail passengers now transferred the 6 miles (10 km) to the ferry terminal by a connecting bus.
Operated by ScotRail, Stranraer Station is staffed part-time and comprises only a single operational platform on a line that is now single track all the way from Dalrymple Junction. After a modest drop in passengers following the loss of the ferry services, numbers have returned to around 50,000 per annum (2016). It is preceded by Barrhill Railway Station, 16 miles (26 km) to the northeast.
