The station first opened on January 1, 1836. The station is located in downtown Rahway on an embankment completed in 1913, with bridges over Milton Avenue and Irving and Cherry Streets. The present station was built by New Jersey Transit at a cost of $16 million and opened in early 1999. It replaced a passenger station built by the Penn Central and the New Jersey Department of Transportation in 1974, which was an Amtrak stop from May 1971–November 1975.[12][10] The City of Rahway completed a $600,000 public plaza in front of the station in 2001.
Another station in the city, North Rahway, previously existed at Scott Avenue, near the Merck facility, but was closed and demolished in 1993.
Platform layout
Rahway is just northeast of the Perth Amboy Junction, where the Northeast Corridor and the North Jersey Coast lines split at Union Tower, so Rahway is one of several transfer stations on NJ Transit. The station has an island platform for the Trenton and Long Branch-bound side of the station. The New York City-bound platform is a side platform more typical of the Northeast Corridor. Service bound for Long Branch and other points on the North Jersey Coast Line use one side of this island platform just east of the junction, as these trains would not be able to switch off of the main track in time to switch onto tracks at the Junction towards the Jersey Shore.
Amtrak's Northeast Corridor services bypass the station via the inner tracks.
Commons Italics denote closed stations, stations under construction, and unused line segments. Stations north of Montvale are operated by Metro-North Railroad