The Forgotten London Railway Built Only For The Dead

London’s population reached close to 2.5 million by 1850, yet burial space remained at around 300 acres, mostly the graveyards attached to old parish churches. In some of these cemeteries, soil had risen several feet above the surrounding streets as bodies accumulated. These overcrowded plots also contributed to pollution seeping into London’s water supply, a problem that would soon become all too obvious.

A cholera epidemic killed almost 15,000 people in London between 1848 and 1849. Contaminated water and soil near the capital’s crowded cemeteries helped spread the disease, prompting Parliament to pass the 1852 Burials Act. The law allowed authorities to permanently shut down overcrowded inner-city churchyards for burial, and London required another place to lay its dead to rest.

However, two men quickly spotted an opportunity: Sir Richard Broun, a Scottish baronet and social reformer, and Captain Richard Sprye, a retired army officer. They established the London Necropolis and National Mausoleum Company in 1852, which was granted unusually broad powers by Parliament to construct a distant cemetery and separate railway stations for burials, and to set fares for both the coffin and the mourners. It wasn’t long before the company’s trustees ousted them from the business.

The newly formed company purchased 2,200 acres of heathland on Woking Common in Surrey, 23 miles southwest of central London, from a local landowner, Lord Onslow. When the ensuing Brookwood Cemetery opened in 1854, comprising some 500 acres of enclosed ground, it was the largest cemetery in the world. London now had somewhere big enough to accommodate all its burials.

The architects Sydney Smirke and Henry Abraham designed Brookwood’s grounds not to resemble the dark, cramped city churchyards they were replacing. Instead, they planted giant sequoias, monkey puzzle trees, and evergreen rhododendrons to give the site the appearance of eternal spring throughout the year.

In 1854, architect William Tite was commissioned to construct a private railway station for the funeral company near Waterloo Bridge Station on York Street. As the main lines at Waterloo were elevated on a brick viaduct, a number of steam-driven hydraulic lifts were installed at ground level to convey coffins from street level to the platforms above. Coffins would then be loaded onto custom-made carriages that were equipped with wooden shelves mounted on rubber-tired rollers, allowing the undertaker to glide his or her cargo directly onto the shelves.

The Anglican section of Brookwood was consecrated by the Bishop of Winchester, Charles Sumner, on November 7, 1854. On November 13, 1854, the railway’s first funeral train, pulled by a London and South Western Railway (L&SWR) engine and crew, made its journey of 23 miles from York Street station to Brookwood. The cemetery company provided the passenger and hearse cars that were towed by the engine.

The company sold First, Second, and Third Class tickets for the living and the dead alike. A first-class coffin rode in a mahogany compartment all to itself, while a third-class coffin was carried in a basic wooden hearse van. Even under its contract with the London parishes, the company still made sure that every third-class pauper received his own grave in the Brookwood cemetery, instead of being dropped into a lime pit as in the city.

Within Brookwood Cemetery was a private branch line with two stations. North Station was for Nonconformists, Catholics, and secular burials, while South Station was for Church of England Anglicans. Both stations had fully licensed refreshment rooms, so mourners could wait for the next train and have something to eat or drink in the meantime, with faith determining which platform they stood on.

In January 1867, an engine driver, provided by the London and South Western Railway, turned up drunk during a stop at Brookwood. The two companies disagreed as to where he had consumed his alcohol, as the cemetery company argued it was not at its licensed station but at a nearby pub. Regardless, it was agreed that trainmen would receive a free meal and a glass of beer while they were on site, to keep them from wandering off.

In October 1862, workmen excavating a plot at Cure’s College burial ground in Southwark uncovered more than 7,900 human bones. They were removed to make way for the new Charing Cross Station and transferred into 220 large chests, which were then transported by night train to Brookwood for re-interment. The funeral line was not simply transporting newly deceased people; it was also transporting the city’s former dead out of the way of development.

When West Hill Golf Club was built beside Brookwood Cemetery in 1909, it came to light that the Necropolis Railway’s fixed fares were actually cheaper than standard train tickets into the surrounding countryside. Accounts suggest some thrifty Londoners dressed in black, bought the cheap fare, and boarded the train alongside grieving families, then followed a footpath through the cemetery to reach the golf course after arriving at Brookwood.

At the turn of the century, Waterloo Station required more space, and the railway company agreed to pay the cemetery company £12,000 for its York Street site. The new terminus was designed by the cemetery company’s general manager, architect Cyril Bazett Tubbs, and opened on February 8, 1902. The building at 121 Westminster Bridge Road, built from red brick and granite, had white glazed arches and chapels of rest.

The railway abolished second-class tickets for living people throughout the network in 1918. The cemetery company, however, failed to update its price list, and coffins retained their three ticket classes. This discrepancy lasted over 20 years, ending with the closure of the railway in 1941.

The funeral train’s fortunes began to decline during the 1920s and 1930s with the arrival of motorized road hearses and new crematoria built by the local authorities. The timetable shows that the trains gradually reduced their frequency to twice-weekly, and finally only ran if they had a booking. The funeral train was on its way out well before anything began to fall from the sky.

When the Blitz hit on December 29, 1940, incendiary bombs landed just off the terminus at Westminster Bridge Road. The funeral train parked in the siding was almost destroyed. It was saved only by some coal trucks parked nearby that took the brunt of the blast. This bought the railway a few more months.

Edward Irish, a 73-year-old Chelsea Pensioner (a military veteran living at the Royal Hospital Chelsea), died in 1941. His coffin was carried from Westminster Bridge Road to Brookwood for burial on April 11 that year, marking the last journey of the London Necropolis Railway.

During the night of April 16 to 17, 1941, London suffered a heavy night attack from the air, which later became known as the Wednesday bombing, after the night of the week it fell on. High-explosive and incendiary bombs destroyed the glass train shed, workshops, mortuaries, and all special rolling stock parked on the siding at the Westminster Bridge Road terminus. Several weeks later, the railway announced that the station was permanently closed.

In the post-war years, the London Necropolis Company’s board considered the cost of repairing the war-damaged terminus and purchasing new carriages, while recognizing that the growing prevalence of motor hearses meant that rail funerals were becoming an outdated affair. The board finally decided in 1947 that the railway would never be reinstated. By the end of that year, every stretch of track inside Brookwood Cemetery had been torn up.

North Station at Brookwood had to be torn down in 1956 because of bad dry rot, leaving behind just concrete platform bases with lowered stone edges once used for loading coffins. In central London, the entrance building and office frontage at 121 Westminster Bridge Road survived the Luftwaffe raid in 1941, and survives today, perhaps the best surviving evidence that such a railway existed in reality.

This content was created with the help of AI.