First of all, it's the world's only railway station named after a work of literature. Waverley was the first prose novel published by Walter Scott, who followed it up with a series of similar stories which became, collectively, the Waverley Novels.

Edinburgh's main railway station is named Waverley in honor of the "Waverley" series of historical novels by the famous Scottish author Sir Walter Scott. The name was adopted around 1854 when several smaller, competing stations in the valley between the Old and New Towns were consolidated into a single hub. At the time, Sir Walter Scott was a national hero and his Waverley novels—the first of which was published in 1814—were incredibly popular and credited with reviving interest in Scottish history and identity. The station’s location itself is historically significant, as it was built on the site of the former "Nor Loch," which was drained to create the railway corridor. To this day, the station remains a tribute to Scott's literary legacy; it is even overlooked by the massive Scott Monument in Princes Street Gardens, which is the largest monument to a writer in the world. Edinburgh Waverley is the only major railway station in the world named after a work of fiction, a fitting distinction for a city that was designated as the first-ever UNESCO City of Literature, proving that even its most vital infrastructure is deeply intertwined with its rich cultural and storytelling heritage.