The Waimea Plains Railway was built in order to improve communication between Dunedin and the Lake Wakatipu district.
The easy terrain meant construction was swift, with the last rail laid on 24 May 1880 and the official opening a couple of months later on 21 July.
Like the Kingston Branch, the Waimea Plains Railway had regularly seen a significant number of passenger excursions on top of normal services throughout its history, and these continued for over a decade after 1945.
The district negotiated a reprieve for three years, promising extra traffic, and DJ class diesel locomotives replaced steam locomotives on the line in January 1969, but less than 24,000 tonnes were carried annually and through trains ceased running in October 1970, replaced with two shunting services, one from Gore to Riversdale and the other from Lumsden to Kingston Crossing, leaving a 9 km gap of line unused, although the tracks were still in place and closure of most of the line came on 1 April 1971.
The 16 kilometres from Lumsden to a silo at Balfour remained open for the transport of wheat, but the quantity was not enough to justify the continued existence even of the truncated portion of the line, and it closed on 15 January 1978.
Both goods shed and passenger shelter still stand at Kingston Crossing, while at the site of Waimea station two points levers are positioned by the old loading bank.
[3] The other junction station in Gore remains with a platform as a stop on the Main South Line between Dunedin and Invercargill, although its passenger service (The Southerner) ceased in 2002.