It was opened in 1841 by the Bristol and Exeter Railway, and served as a junction station for trains to Clevedon and Cheddar, but these lines closed in the 1960s.

[5] "Next train" dot matrix displays and an automated public-address system announce approaching services.

[5] The station is the start point for the Strawberry Line, a foot and cyclepath built mostly on old railway land to Axbridge.

[9] The Strawberry Line Café, run by a local community group, is located on platform 1, and is open most days from 8:00 am to serve commuters.

[10] Just beyond the station, to the west, are a pair of relief lines to allow slower trains to be overtaken.

There are also some cross-over points, allowing trains to terminate on the westbound relief line and then return eastwards.

[13][14][15] Services between London Paddington and Weston-super-Mare call at Yatton in the early morning and evening, running non-stop between Bristol Temple Meads and Nailsea and Backwell.

[19] Occasional Great Western Railway intercity services between London and Weston-super-Mare or Taunton and Exeter also pass through non-stop.

[Note 2][23][24] The line, engineered by Isambard Kingdom Brunel, was built as 7 ft (2,134 mm) broad-gauge.

[22] Services were initially operated by the Great Western Railway (GWR) on behalf of the Bristol & Exeter.

[26] There was also a connection from the main line, albeit at a 10 miles per hour (16 km/h) speed limit, for the few direct trains from Bristol.

A canopy similar to the one for Clevedon trains was built for this bay, and for passengers at the end of the westbound platform.

[27] By around 1900, there were between five and seven services operating daily along the Cheddar Valley Line, with a mixed mail train on Sundays.

[27] A GWR pagoda hut was built in the 1910s at the east end of the eastbound platform, but this was removed some ten years later.

By the 1920s Yatton had 40 staff employed, including a boy selling chocolate and cigarettes, and issued almost 60,000 tickets.

[29] The Wrington Vale line closed in 1931,[22] with traffic having dropped to only two trains per day with no Sunday service.

[27] British Rail was split into business-led sectors in the 1980s, at which time operations at Yatton passed to Regional Railways.

In the 1990s, a stop was added at Yatton for a Royal Mail train to provide a more direct link to Bristol Airport.

[30] When the railways were privatised in 1997, local services at Yatton were franchised to Wales & West, which was in turn succeeded by Wessex Trains, an arm of National Express, in 2001.

[9] The station buildings on the westbound platform have now been converted into the Strawberry Line Café, which opened in 2011, providing employment and training for people with learning disabilities, as well as snacks for commuters, walkers and local residents.

[34] In March 2005, Wessex Trains, the company managing the station at the time, introduced car parking charges.

[38] A year later, in 2006, replica Great Western Railway benches were provided by the National Trust.

[41][42] The group Friends of Suburban Bristol Railways supports the electrification of the line through Nailsea & Backwell,[43][44] as does MP for Weston-super-Mare John Penrose.

[45][46] Yatton Parish Council has stated that adding a roof to the station footbridge is one of their priorities.