Edinburgh Waverley railway station

Where it sits. Waverley occupies the floor of the valley between Edinburgh's Old Town and New Town — the bed of the Nor Loch, drained from the 1760s to let the city expand north. That gives the station a quality no other major British terminus has: it is sunk below the surrounding streets, so you look down onto its glass roof from Princes Street, from North Bridge and from Waverley Bridge, and every approach to the platforms is a descent. The Old Town ridge rises directly to the south with the Scott Monument, the Balmoral clock tower and the castle all within a few hundred metres. It is the northern terminus of the East Coast Main Line, 393 miles from London King's Cross, and the second busiest station in Scotland after Glasgow Central.

The story behind it. Three companies built separate stations on this site in the 1840s — the Edinburgh and Glasgow, the North British and the Edinburgh, Leith and Newhaven — and the muddle was resolved only when the North British absorbed the others and rebuilt everything as one. The name comes from Walter Scott's Waverley novels, whose monument stands overhead in Princes Street Gardens; it remains the only mainline station in the world named after a novel. The station that survives is essentially the rebuild of 1892–1902: nineteen platforms, several of them long island platforms used from both ends, wrapped around a central island of offices under about seven acres of glazed roof. The North British Hotel, now the Balmoral, was raised over the eastern approach in 1902, and its clock has traditionally been kept three minutes fast so that travellers do not miss trains — set right only at Hogmanay. A 2006 fire in the roof and a decade of renovation replaced most of the glass, and the great blond-sandstone booking hall with its stained-glass dome was reopened as a public space rather than a ticket office.

On screen. The station is bound up with the Edinburgh sequence of Avengers: Infinity War, in which Wanda Maximoff and Vision are ambushed by Proxima Midnight and Corvus Glaive and the fight spills from the street into a railway station. Marvel's additional photography in Scotland began in February 2017 and covered Edinburgh, Glasgow and the Highlands, with stage work at Wardpark Studios in Cumbernauld; the exterior material was made on Cockburn Street and the surrounding Old Town lanes, a two-minute walk from Waverley's Market Street entrance, and the station interior on screen is a mix of location plates, built set and digital work — no production is permitted to drop a Chitauri weapon through a live concourse serving twenty-something million passengers a year. The result is a rare thing in superhero cinema: a European city playing itself, named on screen, rather than doubling for New York. Filming crews return often — the station's cavernous scale and Victorian ironwork have supplied period and thriller material for decades — and Network Rail handles requests through a formal filming office, generally at night between the last and first trains.

What you actually see today. Come in from Waverley Bridge and you walk down a ramp onto the concourse; come from Market Street and you arrive at the eastern end near the taxi rank. The roof is the thing to look at: shallow-pitched glazed bays on slim iron columns, redone in clear glass, which floods the concourse with grey northern light and makes the place unexpectedly bright for a sunken station. The former booking hall on the north side keeps its 1900 marble and its coloured glass dome. Platform 20 sits under the Balmoral. The Waverley Steps, the wind-tunnel stair up to Princes Street that generations of Edinburgh residents complained about, were rebuilt in 2012 with a glass canopy and three lifts. Trains leave here for London, Glasgow Queen Street, Aberdeen, Inverness, Fife and the Borders Railway to Tweedbank.

Getting there and timing. The station is the most central point in Edinburgh: five minutes on foot to the Royal Mile, ten to the Scottish National Gallery, twelve to St Andrew Square for the airport tram. Arriving by train from the south, sit on the right after Dunbar for the coastal run past Torness and the Bass Rock. The concourse is at its worst on August afternoons during the Festival and on Friday evenings; mid-morning midweek it is calm enough to look at the architecture. Left luggage, step-free access to every platform and staffed assistance are all available, and the Market Street entrance is the level one if you are avoiding the ramp.