[4] Due to its convenient location at the mouth of the Fils into the Neckar, people have been living in the area since the earliest times, which is attested by finds from the Stone Age.

Finds of weapons and grave goods from the Bronze Age give evidence of a settlement belonging to the Urnfield culture.

[5] In the High Middle Ages, Plochingen was situated in the territory of the Herzogtum Schwaben and formed part of the Neckargau.

The Württemberg part of Plochingen, originally with the bailiwick of Nellingen, was already subordinated to the office in Stuttgart at the beginning of the 15th century.

Since the 12th century Plochingen had had a market for building materials, salt and agricultural goods, including in particular wine, grain, fishing and livestock.

After the Battle of Nördlingen lost for Württemberg, Plochingen's convenient location had a negative effect on the traffic situation during the Thirty Years' War, as imperial troops plundered the town as early as 1634 and many houses burned down.

In 1698 Plochingen became a post station on the imperial postal line between Antwerp and Venice, operated by the House of Thurn- und Taxis.

In 1778 the Hofwerkmeister Johann Christian Adam Etzel (1743-1801; uncle of Gottlieb Christian Eberhard von Etzel) built the covered wooden bridge with a self-supporting span of 70 metres without intermediate pillars across the Neckar, which then became famous in Europe,[9] 1905 it was replaced by the extension of the railway station completely intact.

In 1846, the construction of the Filstalbahn as far as Plochingen led to the connection to the emerging network of the Württembergische Staatsbahnen, only one year after a train had run for the first time in Württemberg on the line between Cannstatt and Untertürkheim.

After the Second World War, the community fell into the American occupation zone and was located in the state Württemberg-Baden from 1945 to 1952.

On April 13, 1948, the municipality of Plochingen was elevated to the status of a town, which became part of the new federal state of Baden-Württemberg in 1952.

Since the beginning of the S-Bahn operation in the Stuttgart area on October 1, 1978, the vehicles have been technically maintained and cleaned in the Bahnbetriebswerk Plochingen.

The Plochingen station is a traffic junction of the Deutsche Bahn at the Neckar-Alb-Bahn (Stuttgart-Tübingen-Horb am Neckar) and the Filstalbahn (Stuttgart-Ulm-Munich).

It was designed as a port for commercial inland navigation exclusively for the pure transport of goods without passenger shipping.