Missing a train in Britain isn't all bad news — at a growing handful of stations, the wait comes with a decent pint in a beautifully restored bit of railway history. From Victorian buffet bars to converted first-class waiting rooms, here are the standouts worth building a journey around.

Sheffield sets the bar, literally. The Grade II-listed Sheffield Tap, opened in 2009 in an Edwardian first-class refreshment room, has kept its 1904 mahogany bar top, Minton tiles and terrazzo floors, and later expanded into a tiled former dining room with its own microbrewery. It pours 11 cask and 14 keg beers, and holds Camra's top three-star rating for interiors of outstanding national importance. The same people run the York Tap and Harrogate Tap.

Further east, the Draughtsman Alehouse on Doncaster's platform 3b revived a Victorian buffet bar that had sat empty for 18 years. It's a family affair named after a grandfather who was an engineering draughtsman, with locomotive drawings on the walls and Yorkshire-brewed ales behind the bar.

The north also claims the grandest of them all: Newcastle's Grade I-listed Centurion, designed by John Dobson and opened in 1893 as a luxurious first-class lounge, later used as police cells, and restored as a pub in 2002. Its Burmantofts Pottery tiling is said to be worth £3.8m.

History buffs should head to Stalybridge near Manchester, where the 1885 buffet bar on platform 4 retains its original marble bar top and fireplace, serves up to 10 changing real ales, and hosts quizzes, folk singalongs and crisp butty pairing events. Camra gives it two stars for historic interest. In Carlisle, Scott & Brassey opened in February in an 1848 Grade II-listed former first-class waiting room, complete with hammerbeam roof and Tudor-style stone fireplaces.

Huddersfield passengers get a lucky double: the independent King's Head and Camerons-owned Head of Steam sit either side of the station's 1847 neoclassical entrance, both stocking a dozen or more cask ales and both in the Good Beer Guide.

Further south, options include the Old Ticket Office in Cambridge (a carriage-themed Young's pub with takeaway canned beer, due to reopen by end of October after roof repairs), Fuller's Tap on the Line — the only pub directly attached to a London tube station, at Kew Gardens — the snug Steamworks micropubs in converted Sussex station buildings at Seaford and Glynde, and the pub in Codsall station's Grade II-listed waiting room in Staffordshire.

Why bother? Because these pubs turn a tedious connection into part of the trip. Several are linked into trails — Stalybridge and Dewsbury's West Riding Reception Rooms sit on the TransPennine Real Ale Trail — and they're a low-cost way to see Victorian railway architecture most people hurry past. If you're doing a tour by rail, you could honestly plan a weekend around this list alone.