London’s Unique Victorian Funeral Railway

During the late-Victorian era, and the early 20th century, there existed in London one particular railway line that the capital’s inhabitants had no desire whatsoever to travel on. Their reluctance was not based on the railway’s lack of comfort or amenities, or the cost of making a journey; it was in fact because the London Necropolis Railway carried the “recently departed” of London to their final resting place!

The LNR was the brainchild of Sir Richard Broun in response to London’s overcrowding of its cemeteries, where graves were being used over and over again for fresh internments. In many cases the bones of the previous burials were being left scattered about at ground level, or sold to local bone mills to be ground up for use as fertilizer. The decomposing bodies also posed a dangerous health risk, should rotting material contaminate adjacent water springs.

An appropriate site was needed by the LNR far enough away from London where no such risk would manifest itself. Eventually an area of Woking Common comprising of 2,000 acres, known now as Brookwood in Surrey, twenty-five miles from London, was purchased and construction work began.

Two stations, North and South, were built on the new site in 1854 – one for the Conformist burials on the south side, and another for the non-Conformists to the north. In October of the same year, the building of the LNR’s York Street railway terminus in central London was built.

On the 13th November 1854, the first funeral train on a unique railway line dedicated to that sole purpose left York Street heading for Brookwood.

However, the new line was not without its initial setbacks. Due to unforeseen railway traffic congestion, it quickly became apparent that the York Street terminus would prove inadequate for the task in hand, so a new one was built behind the mainline station of Waterloo; partly funded by the London & South Western Railway who saw an opportunity to increase their profits by way of a partnership with the LNR.

The newly-built station annexe housed two mortuaries, waiting rooms for the various classes of patrons where a glass screen was erected so that first class parties did not have to look at those in the third class; workshops for a variety of trades and all the other facilities needed to run a station.