Mangalore Junction railway station (formerly Kankanadi railway station is an NSG–3 category Indian railway station in Palakkad railway division of Southern Railway zone. It is an important railway station connecting Konkan, Western Ghat and Malabar railways and is also the gateway to the port city of Mangalore located at Darbar Hill, Padil, Mangalore, 575007. The station is a junction interconnecting Mangalore Central railway station with Kerala in the south, Maharashtra/Goa and Mangalore Sea Port in the north and Bangalore–Chennai in the east. It is the busiest railway junction in the area, as all north- and southbound trains touch Mangalore through this station.

Southern Railway (SR) is one of the eighteen zones of Indian Railways. It is headquartered at Chennai and operates across the states of Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Andhra Pradesh and the union territory of Puducherry. The origin of the Southern Railway can be traced back to the Madras Railway formed in 1845. Southern Railway was created on 14 April 1951 by merging three state railways, namely, the Madras and Southern Mahratta Railway, the South Indian Railway Company, and the Mysore State Railway. Southern Railway maintains about 5,081 km (3,157 mi) of railway lines and operates 727 railway stations.