It lies south-west of the town centre, on the Midland Main Line, 71 miles (115 km) north of London St. Pancras.

In 1857, the leather trade was in recession and so over half of Kettering's population was on poor relief; the railway enabled the town to sell its products over a much wider area and restored it to prosperity.

[2] From 1866, the station was also the terminus of the Midland cross country branch line from Cambridge via St Ives and Huntingdon, until closure in June 1959.

Kettering Civic Society objected to the plans and the canopies and columns were reprieved, later to be sympathetically restored by Railtrack in 2000.

In 1987, Network SouthEast experimentally introduced a shuttle service between Kettering and a new station in the nearby town of Corby.

The new station at Corby was originally planned to open in December 2008, but this was delayed until extra trains were acquired.

From 2009, Kettering became a penalty fare station; a valid ticket or permit to travel must be shown on request.

The station is included in the PlusBus scheme, where bus travel can be added to train tickets for a small additional charge.

Through fares were made available from 68 UK towns and cities to Paris, Brussels and other destinations in France and Belgium in late 2007.

[citation needed] A subway and barrow crossing was used at the station to access the various platforms, until the lifts and stairs were constructed in the 1990s.

This is because 21 new 4-carriage Class 360 EMU units are occasionally used in formations of threes, equivalent to 12 carriages per train, and require the extra platform length to fit fully.

The Class 180s were removed from service in May 2023, and direct trains to Lincoln and Leeds no longer serve Kettering.

Passengers from these stations now have to change at Kettering in order to take an EMR inter-city train north to destinations such as Leicester, Nottingham and Derby.

East Midlands Railway has said it will introduce earlier journeys to London to allow passengers to arrive in Paris or Brussels before 9am.