During the planning stages of the Saint Petersburg railway, two track alignment options were weighed with regard to connecting the fledgling Finnish railways with the important waterborne route on lake Päijänne: one passing through Anianpelto in Asikkala on the narrow isthmus between lake Vesijärvi and the Päijänne, and another grazing the Vesijärvi on its southern shore, in the village of Lahti in Hollola.

[2] The diet of Finland in its 1867 session accepted the Senate's proposal to initiate work on the St. Petersburg railway in the following year.

The fast schedule was intended to combat the economic fallout of the famine of 1866–1868, and the project indeed attracted numerous workers from all over Finland, a number of which settled in Lahti.

As the only cemetery of the parish could not cope with the amount of the dead, a new one dedicated to the deceased builders was founded in the nearby village of Järvenpää, which also housed a temporary hospital.

It bore a resemblance to the original Vyborg railway station building, presumed to have been designed by either Nylander himself or Wolmar Westling.

[4] Shortly after the railway to Heinola was completed, the second station building was deemed to have grown insufficient to meet the needs of the city and the traffic passing through it.

The renovation intended to make the station more efficient, when the more direct track from Helsinki to Lahti was opened on 1 September 2006.