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The station was the only intermediate station on the Cleator and Workington Junction Railway's otherwise mineral branch which left the company's Workington Central to Cleator Moor West main line at Rowrah Branch Junction south of Distington. The other station was Arlecdon at the branch's southern end. The 6 miles 41 chains, single track branch opened for mineral traffic on 1 May 1882 and was known locally as "Baird's Line" and officially as the Rowrah Branch. The branch's main purpose was to acc

The C&WJR was one of the fruits of the rapid industrialisation of West Cumberland in the second half of the nineteenth century, specifically being born as a reaction to oligopolistic behaviour by the London and North Western and Whitehaven, Cleator and Egremont Railways. All lines in the area were primarily aimed at mineral traffic, notably iron ore, coal and limestone, none more so than those built by the C&WJR, which earned the local name "The Track of the Ironmasters". General goods and passe

Passenger services to Oatlands were a stuttering affair. An attempt to provide a regular Mondays to Saturdays service lasted a mere five months in 1883. In 1888 a Saturdays only out and back service to Workington Central calling at Distington and High Harrington was tried, but abandoned in 1892. Another Saturdays only attempt was made in 1909, starting at Arlecdon. It was cut back to start at Oatlands from the end of 1916 and soldiered on on this basis until 1922 when it was withdrawn, never to

The peak year for tonnage on C&WJR lines was 1909, and for progress was 1913, with the opening of the Harrington and Lowca line for passenger traffic. A chronology of the line's affairs from 1876 to 1992 has almost no entries before 1914 which fail to include "opened" or "commenced". After 1918 the position was reversed, when the litany of step-by-step closures and withdrawals was relieved only by a control cabin and a signalbox being erected in 1919 and the Admiralty saving the northern extensi