Can you have a multiple-generational nostalgia experience? If you can, this revival of an award-winning show certainly provides it. First you descend from Waterloo Station’s main concourse, down into the abandoned Eurostar area. A huge clock is set at midnight, perhaps frozen at the moment international services transferred to St Pancras. Within, the bilingual signs and destination screens remain. The only change is a huge Hornby model railway layout, installed in the former waiting area. It all feels very ghostly.

Then it’s up a ramp, and a giant step further back in time. Joanna Scotcher’s set design for The Railway Children has transformed a large chunk of Eurostar platform into a Victorian station, complete with period lamps and elaborately decorated wooden valances above the platform edges.

Meanwhile E. Nesbit’s classic story of a mother and her three children who’ve been reduced to poverty is played out at a cracking pace on a series of mobile stages (director Damian Cruden). These speed up and down the original Eurostar tracks, pushed by cloth-capped stagehands — they, and the cast, clock up a considerable mileage each evening.

Forget the adult film stars of the time, for me Jenny Agutter, playing eldest daughter Bobby in the Railway Children film, was my first swoon. But Amy Noble — who has played Juliet and Rapunzel for Creation Theatre in Oxford — is a worthy substitute as she rips off her red flannel petticoat and prevents a train crash. In strong support in leading roles are Grace Rowe and Tim Lewis as Bobby’s sparky siblings (pictured with her right), Pandora Clifford as their plainly sad mother and Mark Holgate as debonaire stationmaster Perks. But shamelessly upstaging them all is an 1870, very real, Stirling Single locomotive, which makes several guest appearances.

“The Brits do this kind of thing rather well,” said a patronising American voice in the audience behind me. Indeed we do.

Continues until January 7. Tickets: 0871 297 0740 or online at www.seetickets.com.