The Problem: The lockdown has decimated train travel and it is unlikely people will return soon.
The Solution: Make Waterloo station a destination in its own right with a creative use of model trains.
I visited Prague last year and, as a keen steam locomotive and model railway fan, did a search for railway attractions. In addition to a cracking model railway museum, the city also has a model railway restaurant.
It was something I had dreamed of creating from a young age, and visiting it was great fun, with pints arriving in open trucks behind LGB (large-scale) model locomotives that ran along the model railway tracks next to the tables.
As the lockdown has changed travel patterns, fewer people are likely to go through suburban terminuses like Waterloo in future, and anyway the station was always far too quiet off-peak.
To solve both of those issues, I suggest creating the world’s longest model railway bar in the shopping area where the Eurostar used to leave from.
Each seat at the bar would have a QR code to scan, then a punter would choose their drinks and order online, and the drink would be poured at one end of the bar, loaded onto a train, and driven down to the punter to lift off and drink (the bar itself would be in the shape of an island, to enable maximum capacity and a circular track loop so all trains could return to the pouring location).
There would also be simple bar snacks, all of which would be sized so they could be delivered by model train.
Waterloo would then become a place to visit, rather than just a place to commute through, and could attract people all through the night and even during the day, by serving quality coffee with free WiFi, to become a meeting place and workstation for freelancers and students.
The point of the bar would not only be to create an attraction, but to be the show piece of a re-imagination of the station as a destination in its own right, with a mass of new shops and eateries in the former Eurostar shopping area alongside a constantly changing museum space, so that Waterloo would become a tourist destination for foreigners and locals alike to visit.
Much like St Pancras advertised having the world’s longest champagne bar to show itself as more than just a train station, so the model train bar would advertise to the world that Waterloo had become a must-visit attraction.
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