Gunning Railway Station is significant not only in itself as a railway site, but as an integral component of Gunning and its story as a community. The region was originally inhabited by Ngunnawal to the south and Gundungurra to the north, with their rock paintings, middens and artefacts found throughout the region.

The town’s name appears to have been derived from the Indigenous name for the area which was Gonnong or Gunnong, and was later written as Gunning.

In the 1820s the Lachlan River near Gunning was decreed the limit of settlement, beyond which settlers were not permitted to acquire or lease land, although this was often ignored and before long about half the colony‘s sheep grazed beyond the official boundary. The first known squatter in the region was Hamilton Hume, and his brother John Kennedy Hume established a 6000-acre station, later called Collingwood, on the Fish River near Gunning. From here the famous Hume and Hovell overland expedition to Port Phillip Bay set off in 1824.

The village of Gunning was first surveyed in 1829 at which time it had less than a handful of buildings, and again in 1836. One of the most dramatic episodes in the community‘s history was what was known as ‗the Siege of Gunning‘ in January 1840, during which John Hume was shot and killed by bushrangers from the Whitton gang. Thomas Whitton was captured a few days later and was hanged at Goulburn gaol (Ref. A Snapshot of Gunning‘s History‘. Upper Lachlan Shire Council ‗Bypassed but now thriving, Gunning celebrates 200 years, The Canberra Times, March 2021).

The presence of the Hume family in the area encouraged attention from further afield, particularly those looking for grazing land. While there was a brief gold frenzy in the district in 1851, wool has always represented its economic lifeblood.

It is famous as a district producing some of the world‘s highest quality Merino clips. Gunning Railway Station assisted in the transportation of local wool produce, and in 1924 a wool loading dump was installed at the station. The transportation of wool was indeed one of the chief motivations for the expansion of the railways in NSW, with colonial authorities fearing wool from the Riverina and western NSW would be diverted to Victoria rather than Sydney, via river transportation to the Victorian railway at Echuca on the Murray River. And this was particularly important for Gunning as a pre-eminent wool producing district. As the Goulburn Herald and Chronicle reported at the time of the opening (Ref: Opening of the Railway to Gunning‘, Goulburn Herald and Chronicle 3 November 1875, p. 2).

Since 1875, Gunning Railway Station has acted as an important transport link for the community of Gunning. Approximately 200 railway construction workers – ‗navvies‘ – were involved in construction of the line to Gunning. A number of dignitaries and locals attended the opening, with a special train arriving from Sydney, however there was ―a very strong wind, almost a hurricane, blowing throughout the day, thus quite spoiling anything like pleasure in connexion with the day‘s proceedings.‖ (Ref: Opening of the Railway to Gunning‘, Goulburn Herald and Chronicle 3 November 1875, p. 2). For a year the station represented the terminus of the line, subsequently becoming a stopover on the line stretching further south from Sydney, and ultimately connecting to the Victorian network.

This theme of transport is central to the story of Gunning, the community having also been an early Cobb & Co stop, and until 1995 being on the route of the old Hume Highway.