London is no stranger to gory stories, it’s got a past that’s littered with them. As squeamish, grisly and sometimes downright dark as they may be, it’s all still pretty fascinating stuff.
But here’s one that you might not have known; there was once a 19th-century railway which transported dead bodies from central London to a cemetery in Surrey, which is the largest cemetery in the UK and one of the largest in Europe.
Fittingly named the London Necropolis Railway and run by the London Necropolis Company, the line was in operation from 1854 to 1941 and carried up to 2,000 bodies a year from Waterloo to the newly built Brookwood Cemetery in Surrey. Most of its route ran along existing tracks of the London and South Western Railway although it did have its own branches from the main line.
Why did the railway exist?
London’s population stood at just under a million in 1801, but it grew to 2.5 million within 50 years. A rapidly growing population coupled with limited space in the city’s graveyards was a major concern for the government. The situation became so dire that the oldest graves had to be exhumed to free space for new burials, pauper coffins were left unburied in church crypts, and perhaps worst of all, it has been said that grave diggers were reported to have cut up recently buried bodies to create more space.
The railway line was created in response to London’s crisis of overcrowding in its existing cemeteries. Brookwood Cemetery was conceived, along with the London Necropolis Railway, to alleviate the pressures of housing the dead in overcrowded London and at the time was the largest cemetery in the world.
In the years that the Necropolis Railway was in operation, over 200,000 burials took place in Brookwood Cemetery which equates to roughly 2,300 corpses a year.
The railway had different classes
The passengers of the Necropolis Railway were not only the dead but included the living too. Mourners also boarded the train to take them and their deceased beloved to Necropolis Junction to be buried in the cemetery. There were three different which separated the bodies.
First-class meant that mourners were given the choice of where the gravesite would be in the cemetery and included a permanent memorial which disallowed the LNC from re-using the gravesite. There was also a first-class platform that had five separate waiting rooms for attendants to wait comfortably in.
Second-class provided some choice of burial location but a permanent memorial was not included in the price and cost an extra 10 shillings. Third-class bodies were buried at the cost of the parish in the area of the cemetery designated for the parish, these were known as pauper funerals of which permanent memorials were not allowed.
What happened to the railway?
Although the service was intended to be run daily, it instead only ran when were was at least one first-class coffin or passenger and by 1902 they scrapped the whole daily service entirely and it ran only when needed.
During World War Two, the area of Waterloo was heavily bombed and the rolling stock in the Necropolis was burned as well as damage to the railway arch that connected that main line to the Necropolis terminals. On May 1941 the station was officially declared closed and marked the end of the railway line which once transported dead bodies from the big smoke.