George Washington Wilson was a hugely successful businessman who by the 1860s owned a printing works in Aberdeen which was producing thousands of views of Britain each year. Many of these photographs showed the increasing signs of industrialisation on the landscape of British cities. In this photograph, train carriages can be seen waiting on lines outside Waverley Station in Edinburgh. An 1845 photograph by the pioneering photographers Hill and Adamson (whose studio is just visible in this photograph) shows the demolition required to make space for these railway lines. Their earlier photograph was taken from a similar vantage point and shows a number of buildings (including the Trinity College Chapel) in the process of deconstruction.