The frontage of Axminster station as it looks today, after recent restoration work,
photographed on 10 April 2005.

photograph by Peter Richards

photograph by Chris Osment

Axminster station opened along with the LSWR main line to Exeter Queen Street on 19 July 1860. The building was designed in mock gothic style complete with tall chimneys and multiple steeply pitched gables by LSWR architect Sir William Tite. At the time the station opened it served only a small population of 3000. The track runs roughly north-east to south-west and is level through the station, but there are gradients of 1 in 255 up in the Yeovil direction and 1 in 240 down in the Exeter direction. The entire main line to Exeter was double track by July 1870. There was a goods yard, complete with cattle pens and a goods shed on the eastern Down side of the station. When the line was originally built there was also an engine shed situated near the goods yard entrance to the Down main line. This was used to house a locomotive used for banking trains to Honiton, though the banking requirement ceased when more powerful locomotives became available and the shed was demolished circa 1903.

photo via George Reeve of Irwell Press

Also in 1903 Axminster became a junction station with the opening of the branch, built under light railway regulations, to Lyme Regis. This branch terminated in a bay platform on the western side of the Up platform and this required the branch to cross the main line on an over-bridge at the Exeter end of the goods yard and descend into the bay platform on a 1 in 80 gradient. There was also a direct goods-only connection from the goods yard to the branch south of the over-bridge, but this was abolished in 1915.

Through coaches were attached to some branch trains requiring complex shunting moves via an up siding which was not signalled for passenger trains. As a point for engines to take on water both of the main platforms had a water column at their end, and there was also a column for branch services by the buffers on the bay platform. The water for these was drawn from the River Axe and pumped by a stationary steam engine into a large water tank adjacent to the bay platform buffer-stop.