Bring together York, the railways, the National Railway Museum, olden Yorkshire and The Railway Children, and this is one of those special creations that makes you proud it was Made In York.

“Take it to London,” as the watching panto dame Berwick Kaler said afterwards, “and it would not have the same soul”.

So ended last summer’s review of the second run of Damian Cruden’s production at the NRM. Well, The Railway Children is now in London, on a real disused railway line on the old Eurostar terminal at Waterloo International Station, and it still does have soul.

It is bigger – everything in London is. The giant poster that greets you at the top end of the station has Cruden and writer Mike Kenny’s names in big letters, York Theatre Royal too, along with Welcome To Yorkshire, so important to the transfer south, and the Touring Consortium Theatre Company that has taken on the producing role for the London run.

Now you can buy The Railway Children mugs and T-shirts and red flags en route to your seat, as the commercial aspect of this remarkable enterprise is cranked up.

The actors face a quarter-mile walk from dressing room to stage, not convenient when you find yourself without your trousers, as Blair Plant did on one occasion, necessitating him to sprint back in only his underpants and Russian dissident writer’s beard.

Audience members are told they face a five to ten-minute walk to take up their seats on Platform One or Two in the station turned theatre that has twice the capacity of the NRM show, 1,000 seats a show now, and every one of them taken at Monday’s press night when the great and the good and the old stars were in too.

There’s Bond girl Honor Blackman with Nickolas Grace from Brideshead Revisited; Stephen Tompkinson in a cream suit; and Don Warrington. Oh, and look isn’t that Sally Thomsett and Bernard Cribbins from the 40-year-old film that so helpfully moved the story’s Edwardian rural setting from Kent to Yorkshire? Indeed so.

Apparently, steam railway enthusiast Pete Waterman, the pop svengali, was there too, and definitely theatre director Max Stafford Clark, model railway devotee and director of David Hare’s railway play The Permanent Way, was in too.

They will not be alone because this show has all the bang and whizz of a West End show but takes site-specific theatre to new heights while being a fantastic piece of storytelling theatre with social comment and political zeal too.

It should have won gongs galore in the regional theatre awards in 2008 when only Richard G Jones’s lighting received due attention, but now it will surely make its mark on the London award circuit next year, and do not be surprised if the production run is extended beyond September. The actors have been asked to keep their diaries open to December, and rightly so.

This is the third time that your reviewer has seen this show, York twice and now London, and admiration for Damian Cruden’s vision, Joanne Scotcher’s traverse set design, Mike Kenny’s moving, amusing script, Christopher Madin’s wonderful score and Jones’s lighting grows anew.

Craig Vear’s contribution as sound designer comes more to the fore. Rather than the wooden platforms constructed at the NRM, the Waterloo platforms are made of concrete, and the rumbling sound of the train on the track is louder, packed with more “sub-bass” that makes your seat shudder. Fantastic! How the children loved that sensation.

The Great Northern Railway’s Stirling Single engine still steals the show, drawing applause on its first entrance, later joined by the new addition of the Old Gentleman’s Carriage.

The cast is largely new, although Sarah Quintrell returns for a third run as eldest child Roberta and Ashes To Ashes star Marshall Lancaster is back from 2008 as the perky station master Albert Perks.

Does it lose anything in the move from Yorkshire to London?

Maybe the audience laughs at all things Yorkshire, rather than with, and the Fortnum & Masons hamper evokes a knowing laugh that would not have been present up north, but The Railway Children is a hit all over again in any language.

• The Railway Children is running in the Welcome To Yorkshire Theatre at Waterloo Station, London, until September 5. Box office: 0871 2970740.