Waterloo Station is a short-lived Australian television soap opera created by Reg Watson and produced by the Reg Grundy Organisation for the Nine Network in 1983. The series began with a movie-length episode and continued on with hour long episodes.
Waterloo Station focused on two sisters, both married to policemen, and their adult children starting careers in the police force. The main locations were a police station, a police training academy in Sydney, and a large boarding house that provided accommodation for several characters.
Waterloo Station was an attempt by Grundy's to reproduce for Channel Nine the success of their earlier shows The Restless Years and The Young Doctors which focused on youth situations. Like Crawford Productions' successful police series Cop Shop, Waterloo Station combined police procedural elements with domestic situations involving the police personnel and their families.
The series was recorded at the Eric Porter studios in North Sydney.
Peter Wilmoth of The Age said of the first episode: "Waterloo Station will need time to develop. The first impression of NineâÂÂs new drama series is that it has enough excitement and reasonable acting to succeed. The second impression nags: it is lacking in subtlty (sic)." He later wrote: "Waterloo Station buried its initial promise in the cause of froth. Apart from the occasional moving scene, the show is frustratingly unsubtle and zealously protective of its clichés. The Sydney Morning HeraldâÂÂs Harry Robinson stated: "By literary standards, Waterloo Station is crude in its appeal to young people of scant education. It plays on youth's yen for feeling hard-done-bv and alienated from oldies." Mike Carlton wrote in The Sydney Morning Herald: "a better title might be Cop Shop meets the Sons and Daughters off Certain Women for, as with the marching East Germans, there was more than a smidgeon of déjàvu about things." Also in The Sydney Morning Herald, Rosalind Reines called it "hammy but enthralling". Anthony Clarke in The Age commented: "We shouldn't expect too much from our soapies. But surely a prime-time evening show should be more than just a non-stop talk marathon devoid of drama, of action or romance".
There is yet to be a DVD Release of Waterloo Station.
The series was programmed against the popular new series Carson's Law in key markets including Melbourne, and achieved only mediocre ratings. It was cancelled after 40 episodes. Andrew Clarke, Danny Roberts and Sally Tayler all subsequently found greater success as regular cast members of another Grundy-produced soap opera, Sons and Daughters.
After Waterloo Station, on 18 April 1983, Grundy launched Starting Out, which featured youthful characters attempting to enter the medical profession. This series was similarly short-lived.
During late 1987, while âÂÂThe Midday Showâ was taking a summer Christmas holiday break, Nine network Sydney replayed Waterloo Station on weekdays at 12pm followed at 1.00pm by âÂÂPrivate Benjaminâ (a US comedy TV series). Waterloo Station has never been replayed since on commercial or pay TV in Australia.