For just over a century, Denbigh was connected to the outside world by rail. The Vale of Clwyd Railway opened in 1858, running from Rhyl through St Asaph to Denbigh, initially without a direct connection to the main coastal line, which was added in 1862.
Denbigh's own station started life as a temporary structure before a permanent limestone building — complete with freestone door and window surrounds — opened in December 1860, doubling as the railway company's headquarters. The line brought Denbigh within easy reach of the booming Victorian and Edwardian resort towns of the North Wales coast, and from the 1920s it saw growing numbers of holidaymakers.
Despite this, the line never achieved the traffic its promoters had hoped for. Passenger services to Denbigh ended on 30 April 1962, goods services followed on 4 May 1964, and the line closed completely in 1965 as part of the wider contraction of Britain's rural railways. Today, only fragments of platform edge survive to mark where Denbigh's railway once stood.
The Vale of Clwyd Railway opened in October 1858, running from a junction with the main coastal line at Rhyl up through the valley to a terminus at Denbigh, with intermediate stations serving Foryd, Rhuddlan, St Asaph, Llannerch and Trefnant. The line gave Denbigh's markets and businesses a direct connection to the expanding Victorian railway network, and by extension to the seaside resorts and industrial towns of the North Wales coast.
Passenger services on the line survived until September 1955, one of many rural Welsh branch lines to close in the years before the more sweeping Beeching cuts of the 1960s. Little trace of the railway remains today beyond the occasional embankment or bridge abutment in the Vale of Clwyd, but its role in connecting Denbigh to the wider world during the railway age remains an important chapter in the town's economic history.