An early important service was correspondence with a train from Oslo to a coastal ferry, as it was the closest line to Agder until 1927.

From the opening until 1964 the line saw between ten and nineteen daily round trips with a commuter train to Skien.

[9] The line passes a halt at Prestealléen (2.23 km or 1.39 mi from Eidanger) before reaching Nystrand Station (2.75 kilometers or 1.71 miles).

[1] The station served a popular recreational area and generated a lot of the holiday and weekend traffic on the line.

The main line continues past a halt at Ørvik (8.24 kilometers or 5.12 miles) before reaching Norcem Brevik.

[15] The committee's proposals called for a branch from the Vestfold Line to Brevik, although it would run from Porsgrunn via Roligheten and Kleveland.

Thus Brevik Municipality was forced to pay for all expropriation along the line and limited their support for the entire project to NOK 16,000.

However, there was not community consensus as to the location of Brevik Station, with large camps each preferring Strømtangen and Setretangen.

Surveying started in May 1894 and allowed negotiations for expropriation to commence in the fall, which lasted a half year.

[22] An important function of the line was that it allowed correspondence with the coastal ferry route onwards to Kristiansand, which commenced in 1896 because Brevik at the time was the furthest along the coast the railway had reached.

[23] A daily night train with direct service to Oslo was offered, initially with a travel time of six hours and seven minutes.

This was supplemented with a direct commuter service to Porsgrunn, initially bringing the number of daily trains to 20.

[23] Although the passenger service first and foremost served commuters into Porsgrunn and Skien, it also saw a large reverse traffic of city-dwellers travel to the Eidangerfjord to recreate.

[25] Plans for a railway ferry service to Continental Europe were launched in 1912, when representatives from market towns along the coast from Vestfold to Agder were called to discuss the matter.

Council Carl Stousland was the main initiator, and visited various ports in Denmark searching for a suitable site.

However, the poor timing for passengers from Drammen and Vestfold, in addition to surplus cost of keeping sleeping cars, forced the night service to a halt from 1918.

[27] To secure compatibility with the Bratsberg Line, which had been opened in 1917, the section of track past Grenland to Eidanger and onwards to Brevik was converted to standard gauge in 1921.

When it opened on 16 June it succeeded a period of four years where the segment from Eidanger to Skien had dual gauge.

[28] In cooperation with commercial interests, NSB ran a summer service from Kongsberg marketed as the "bathing train" to attract inlanders to the coast.

[31] With the electrification the line saw a major increase in traffic—by 1951 there were eighteen round trips and nineteen from 1957, operating at a fixed, hourly headway.

[1] Following the 1962 opening of the Brevik Bridge the railway saw a sharp decline in patronage as the bus service was rerouted, capturing more of the traffic.

[33] CargoNet started a weekly container train service each from Brevik to Oslo and Bergen in 2014, allowing for transit from ship traffic.