Corfe Castle lies in the centre of the Isle of Purbeck, a peninsula bordered by the English Channel to the south, and by the marshy lands of the River Frome and Poole Harbour to the north and east.

At the beginning of the 19th century, the area around Corfe Castle was known for its supply of Purbeck Ball Clay, which at that time was shipped by a pair of horse-drawn tramways (the Middlebere Plateway and the Furzebrook Railway) to wharves on Poole Harbour.

Proposals to use the railway route through the Corfe Castle gap as a road bypass for the village were eventually rejected by the county council in 1986.

It was therefore decided to extend the line a further half a mile north to a new Park and Ride site built on the former location of the exchange sidings between the Swanage branch and the clay tramways.

[5] A 5-year project by Swanage Railway volunteers to install a footbridge across the running lines between the platforms at Corfe Castle was completed in April, 2007, when David Quarmby, CBE, carried out the official opening.

In summer 2018 and 2019 South Western Railway operated two trains per day to/from Wareham, one of which continued to Poole and the other to London Waterloo via Weymouth.

There were also National Rail services on Saturdays and Sundays between Wareham and Swanage in summer 2018 and 2019 operated by West Coast Railway Company with three trains per day in each direction.

The museum includes Secundus, a narrow gauge steam locomotive built by Bellis and Seekings in 1874 for the nearby Furzebrook Railway.