Gray's railway history began in the mid-19th century. At the time, Gray was a prosperous town. This was mostly due to the presence of numerous surface iron deposits and its important port activity as the end of the navigable Saône. This is how the people of Gray and residents of Haute Saône of all stripes came to campaign for a railway from Dijon to Mulhouse passing through Gray and Vesoul, which would have been the most favorable from a structural and geographical point of view, but it was the route by the valley of the Doubs which will be finally retained with a branch towards Gray.

With the construction of new lines, Gray found itself equipped with an international station with a five-branch star network with lines to Nancy, Chalon sur Saône, Besançon, Langres (Culmont-Chalindrey) and Troyes. The station also served as a border between the Est Railway Company and the Paris to Lyon and the Mediterranean Railway Company, which both wanted to share this heavy traffic and had significant steam locomotive maintenance yards.

Thus, Gray was an important stop on the first line from Dijon to Nancy (by Auxonne and Vesoul) for a few decades, and still saw a significant flow of traffic between Switzerland, Italy and the Paris region until the 1930s. The (Chalon s / Saône) Auxonne-Vesoul route in particular was very strategic from a military point of view, and in Gray, were built important military storage facilities. However, after the war of 1870, it was decided to bypass the Dijon-Nancy line with a line further west, passing through Chalindrey and Neufchateau, as the line passing through Gray was declared too close to the German border. Once peace settled this line therefore lost its international utility.

Moreover, the industry of Gray did not modernize like the rest of France, and after the Second World War, many structures were not rebuilt. In particular, the Station Building was partially destroyed, and the railway bridge over the Saône (for the line to Besançon) will never be permanently rebuilt. The line to Auxonne, lost its passenger traffic in 1938, and was closed to regular traffic in multiple steps starting in the 1950s.

Nonetheless, there did remain substantial freight traffic on the remaining lines with grain trains, agricultural machinery and telephone poles among others, chartered by CFTA (Société Générale de Chemins de Fer et de Transports Automobiles), which also handled the revenue passenger trains from Dijon to Vesoul (via Is Sur Tille) and towards Culmont-Chalindrey.

The last passenger train left Gray in 1970 and at the end of the Steam on the Star in 1975 (and by the same token, in France), a lot of freight traffic was reduced, eventually leaving only revenue traffic on short sections. But, the people of Gray and its surroundings demand more trains, and many tourist and steam movements have taken place on the star since. The use of steam until 1975 left the CFTAs with the means to repair steam locos on behalf of tourist railways until 2014. And gatherings of 141R, 231K or 231G remained commonplace in Gray for decades.

For around a decade and until 1991, the line to Chalindrey was the sole usable route to Gray. This situation changed when this line was abandoned in favor of the Auxonne line due to lack of maintenance. At the end of 2018, the last sections of the Is sur Tille and Vesoul lines used until now for the service of silos were abandoned which only leaves the line to Auxonne in use.