Only a few parts of this long-forgotten railway line remain standing, but it once carried up to 2,000 people a year on their final journeys along with their mourning loved ones clad in black
Brockwood Cemetery still has a few remaining sections of track where the London Necropolis Railway ran(Image: Surrey Advertiser – Grahame Larter)
The Victorians have a reputation for dealing with death in strange ways, from photographing the dead to their obsession with Memento Mori objects, reminding them of the inevitability of death. But one almost forgotten part of Victorian history is particularly creepy and involves a long-abandoned railway line.
Early into Queen Victoria’s reign, the city faced a horrific problem. It had doubled in size thanks to the Industrial Revolution, bringing the population up to 2.5 million, many of whom lived in crowded, unsanitary conditions, causing outbreaks of conditions such as Cholera. London was the largest city in the world, but it also had insufficient sewage facilities and poor water quality, leading to disease and death. A Londoner born in the 1840s had an average life expectancy of just 36.7 years.
London’s churches soon found their graveyards were full to capacity, leading to the horrific practice of exhuming the recently deceased to make way for newer burials. As a solution, a huge new cemetery was planned in Brookwood, Surrey, but the plodding horse and carriages of the time would have taken hours to transport a body to this location. Therefore, the idea for the London Necropolis railway was formed.
The London Necropolis railway station was built next to Waterloo, and had a beautiful, ornate exterior typical of Victorian architecture. Here, the bodies of people of all ages and social classes were readied for their final 23-mile journey to the new Brookwood Cemetery in leafy Surrey, a world away from the grubby streets of London.
Coffins were issued a one-way ticket, while the mourners accompanying them would get a return ticket to take them back into the city after the service. Once the trains arrived in Brookwood, they made two stops in the Anglican and Nonconformist parts of the cemetery, depending on the religion of the deceased.
While all sorts of people were laid to rest in Brookwood, the rich, of course, enjoyed a better class of funeral than the Victorian poor. A first-class funeral came with a choice of burial plots and the ability to erect a permanent memorial. Those who chose a second-class funeral could put up a gravestone or other memorial for an additional cost, but if they failed to do so, the grave could end up being reused.
In third class were people who had a pauper’s funeral, paid for by their local parish. While these people weren’t given their own gravestone, they did get separate graves, which were much more dignified than the horrific burial practices going on at London’s graveyards at the time. The London Necropolis Company (LNC) carried out the burials, and about 80% of the funerals it held were third class, for those whose families couldn’t afford a service.
First and second class passengers had a separate waiting area, and their loved ones’ names were announced as their coffins were carried onto the train, a ceremonial touch not afforded to those headed to unmarked graves.
As London grew, and with the building of the London Underground, proper sewage systems, and overground railways, many churchyards stood in the way. The Necropolis Railway took on a huge new project, relocating the bodies from 21 churchyards across the city to the Surrey cemetery
Trains ran daily, and Sundays were a particularly busy day for funerals. It was the only day of the week when many workers had off, and by scheduling their loved ones’ funerals, they could avoid taking an extra day off.
The London Necropolis Railway ran until 1941, when a World War Two bomb destroyed the London station and track. By that point, funeral directors were increasingly using motorised hearses, and in the post-WW2 reconstruction of the city, the destroyed funeral train service wasn’t seen as a priority.
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Visit Westminster Bridge House and you can still see some of the façade of the old station building, although the old sign is boarded up. However, in Brookwood Cemetery, the remains of this unusual chapter of history are still on display. You can still see parts of the track, and plaques commemorate the 200,000 people who reached their final resting place on this unique train line.
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