Carstairs railway station serves the village of Carstairs in South Lanarkshire, Scotland and is a major junction station on the West Coast Main Line (WCML), situated close to the point at which the lines from London Euston and Edinburgh to Glasgow Central merge.

In 1885 a correspondent known as Trans-Clyde to the Glasgow Herald reported on the poor state of the platforms at Carstairs:In the interest of the travelling public whose number is legion, allow me to bring to notice the most urgent and pressing necessity which exists for the directors of the Caledonian Railway taking immediate measures to put the platform at Carstairs Junction into such a condition as shall answer efficiently all the purposes of a railway platform intended for the use of travellers…If your or any of your readers have been to Carstairs Railway Station, on the opening of the doors of the railway carriage they must have seen that the stone platform on which they are required to alight for the purpose of changing carriages (the main or almost sole object of this station) is several feet below the level of the carriage which they occupy-how many feet in each case I cannot say, as it may vary but lately I took occasion to measure the distance between the platform and the floor of a carriage from which I had managed to descend, and found it to be 3 feet 4 inches at least.

[8] The existing island platform buildings were remodelled with new windows and doors and the exterior was given a dressed stonework finish.

On a test run from Glasgow to Carstairs scheduled for 10 February 1930 it was approaching Carstairs station at slow speed, when one of the ultra-high-pressure tubes burst and the escaping steam ejected the coal fire through the fire-hole door, killing Lewis Schofield of the Superheater Company.

[11] The route through the station was electrified in the 1974 electrification scheme that covered the West Coast Main Line between Weaver Junction and Glasgow Central.

The original station buildings were being retained, and continuous railings were provided to prevent passengers accidentally falling down from one level to the other.

[12] This height difference has now been removed as the original station buildings were demolished and replaced with a more modern alternative and the entire platform was levelled off.

[14] New track sections, overhead lines, signalling and telecoms were installed, with improvements to station platforms, embankments and drainage across the junction.

Additionally, the junction south of the station for trains heading towards or from Edinburgh was limited to 15mph and presented a bottleneck for operations.

These can now both be accessed from any direction - removing another restriction - and new loops for passing freight and slower passenger trains have been constructed north of the station.

However, the introduction of push-pull operation on the WCML and the availability of surplus HST sets for Cross Country traffic (as a result of the ECML electrification) largely eliminated this practice in the early 1990s.

There were also a few extra trains operated by ScotRail to/from Glasgow Central Low Level which call at peak times.