Waterloo Station is the London terminus that links the expected arrival of Sir Henry Baskerville with Sherlock Holmes’s escape from a mounted pursuit. In the evidence surrounding the Baskerville inheritance, the station is both a practical meeting point and the place where a concealed investigation briefly comes into view before vanishing again into the crowd of railway travel.

Sir Henry Baskerville’s Expected Arrival

James Mortimer asks Sherlock Holmes for advice about what to do with Sir Henry Baskerville, whom he says is due to arrive at Waterloo Station in exactly an hour and a quarter. The timing gives the consultation immediate urgency: Sir Henry is the heir to the estate, and Mortimer speaks not only as a doctor but as executor and trustee of Sir Charles Baskerville’s will. He reports that the young man has been farming in Canada and is regarded as an excellent fellow. The station thus enters the story as the threshold of Sir Henry’s return to his family’s affairs, before the dangers surrounding that inheritance have been resolved.

The Cab Pursuit

Waterloo Station also becomes the destination in the account of a cabdriver who has been drawn into Sherlock Holmes’s pursuit. After waiting an hour and a half, the driver sees two gentlemen walking and follows them along Baker Street in London. When they have gone roughly three-quarters of the way down Regent Street, his passenger orders him to drive at full speed to Waterloo Station. The driver whips up his mare and reaches the station in under ten minutes; his passenger pays two guineas and enters. Just before going in, he identifies himself to the driver as Sherlock Holmes.

A Point of Convergence

The two episodes give the station different but connected functions. For James Mortimer, it is the scheduled point of arrival of the heir whose safety and future must be considered. For Holmes, it is an exit: the cabdriver sees him enter, but sees no more of him afterward. The contrast compresses the novel’s larger movement between public, ordinary travel and a private investigation conducted under pressure. Waterloo Station is not where the mystery is explained; it is where a crucial figure arrives on the story’s horizon and where another slips from a pursuer’s sight.