The old town and many public facilities such as the Meiningen Theatre, Schloss Elisabethenburg (castle), hotels and the law courts are located nearby.

The site for the railway tracks was originally in the northwest of the town at the foot of the Herrenberge mountain, but this project fell through.

To meet the ever-increasing need for maintenance and repair work storage sidings were built on the Werra line.

In 1863 a rail depot was built with a roundhouse and a turntable opposite the entrance building, requiring the locomotive shed to be partly demolished.

As the number of tracks at the crossing of the Marienstraße increased from two to ten, controlling traffic with barriers was no longer considered reasonable.

So a 100 metre long tunnel was built, crossing under the railway tracks and platforms, connecting the city centre and the Oststadt district with one another.

With the opening of the Neudietendorf–Ritschenhausen railway in 1884, the station was on a long-distance route connecting Berlin with Stuttgart via Erfurt and Würzburg.

In the southern part of the railway property a storage tank was built for the supply of fuel to petrol stations.

In the Second World War the station was damaged in an American air attack during Operation Clarion, including the destruction of the southern railway tracks, a road bridge over them, signal box 4 and the tank farm.

Meiningen station was now the start and end point for express and semi-fast trains to Erfurt, Halle, Leipzig, Berlin, Dresden–Görlitz and Stralsund–Barth (Ostsee).

After German reunification in 1990 and the reopening of the Meiningen–Schweinfurt line in 1991, the first new express services were established from Berlin via Meiningen to Würzburg or Schweinfurt.

After the closure of these services by Deutsche Bahn at the end of the 1990s, Meiningen station increasingly lost its importance.

The city built a new bus station in 1998 adjacent to the railway land near platforms 1 and 2, offering travellers good connections between buses and trains.

In 2001 Deutsche Bahn transferred regional rail services in the southern Thuringia area to Süd-Thüringen-Bahn (STB), founded in 1999.

The entrance building contains the following customer facilities: travel agency/ticketing, ticket machines, bakery and snack bar, waiting area and a games room.

With 96 trains a day (weekdays, as of 2015/6), Meiningen station has direct Regional-Express (RE) and Regionalbahn (RB) connections on four lines to the following places: at destination