It is situated on the southern edge of the city-centre, just outside the Coventry ring road, about 250 yards to the south of junction 6.

There are also long distance CrossCountry services to Manchester Piccadilly to the north and Reading and Bournemouth to the south.

The original station was built in 1838 as part of the London and Birmingham Railway and could be entered from Warwick Road, where two flights of stairs took the passengers down to the platform.

Within two years it had been replaced, with a new larger station, a few hundred feet nearer to Rugby, this time, accessed via Eaton Road.

There was an engine shed, water column and turntable, in its later days an inclined walkway from the platform directly to Warwick Road for summer excursion passengers, and a parcel depot formed from old carriages.

In 1881 the London and North Western company planned extensive alterations and improvements at an estimated cost of £12,000 to £13,000 to remedy the situation.

The cutting opposite the signal box on the Leamington Line was widened and the stone bridge in Stoney Lane replaced with an iron girder one.

[7] The interior of the station was extended to where the current entrance was, and the refreshment rooms, telegraph and other offices were built on the space formerly roof-in as a cab stand.

[11] By 1935 the station needed additional facilities and a plan was prepared to provide a new island platform of 920 ft in length on the down Birmingham side at a cost of £70,000 to £80,000.

[12] Although the railway company had wanted a larger scheme of improvement, the full plan could not be delivered at this time, so the island platform was the first stage.

The construction of the island platform did not start until 1939,[15] but was put on hold by the outbreak of the Second World War and never completed to the original LMS plans.

In the early 1960s, during electrification of the line, both bridges were widened, and the old station finally demolished and re-built, this time with room for four platforms instead of two.

[1][19][20] The new station featured a new parcel depot, used to manage the large number of mail order catalogue packages coming into Coventry at the time.

The London and Birmingham Railway opened a small motive power depot at the west end of the station in 1838.

There is a small yard at the Birmingham end of the station, in front of the shopping centre that was once part of Coventry's yard, that is used by London Midland for the stabling of electric traction units, no heavy work is carried out at Coventry as that is done at either Soho TMD (for Class 323s) or Northampton Siemens depot (Class 350s).