London Necropolis Railway

London Necropolis Railway
London Necropolis Railway
Overview
Status	Branches into the termini at both ends defunct; most of the route still in use as part of the South West Main Line
Owner	The London Necropolis and National Mausoleum Company (renamed London Necropolis Company after 1927)
Locale	London and Surrey
Termini	London Necropolis railway station; Brookwood Cemetery;
Stations	3 dedicated stations; other stations on the London and South Western Railway also served occasionally
Service
Type	Funeral train
History
Opened	13 November 1854
Closed	11 April 1941 (last day of service; official closure May 1941)
Technical
Line length	24 mi (39 km)
Track gauge	1,435 mm (4 ft 8+1⁄2 in) standard gauge
Route map
Route map
	Legend

The London Necropolis Railway was a railway line opened in November 1854 by the London Necropolis Company (LNC), to carry corpses and mourners between London and the LNC's newly opened Brookwood Cemetery, 23 miles (37 km) southwest of London in Brookwood, Surrey. At the time the largest cemetery in the world, Brookwood Cemetery was designed to be large enough to accommodate all the deaths in London for centuries to come, and the LNC hoped to gain a monopoly on London's burial industry. The cemetery had intentionally been built far enough from London so as never to be affected by urban growth and was dependent on the recently invented railway to connect it to the city.

The railway mostly ran along the existing tracks of the London and South Western Railway (LSWR) but had its own branches from the main line at both London and Brookwood. Trains carried coffins and passengers from a dedicated station in Waterloo, London, onto the LSWR tracks. On reaching the cemetery, the trains reversed down a dedicated branch line to two stations in the cemetery, one for the burial of Anglicans and one for Nonconformists (non-Anglicans) or those who did not want a Church of England funeral. The station waiting rooms and the compartments of the train, both for living and for dead passengers, were partitioned by both religion and class to prevent both mourners and cadavers from different social backgrounds from mixing. As well as the regular funeral traffic, the London Necropolis Railway was used to transport large numbers of exhumed bodies during the mass removal of a number of London graveyards to Brookwood.

The company failed to gain a monopoly of the burial industry, and the scheme was not as successful as its promoters had hoped. While they had planned to carry between 10,000 and 50,000 bodies per year, in 1941 after 87 years of operation, only slightly over 200,000 burials had been conducted in Brookwood Cemetery, equalling roughly 2,300 bodies per year.

On the night of 16–17 April 1941, the London terminus was badly damaged in an air raid and rendered unusable. Although the LNC continued to operate occasional funeral services from Waterloo station to Brookwood railway station immediately north of the cemetery, the London Necropolis Railway was never used again. Soon after the end of the Second World War the surviving parts of the London station were sold as office space, and the rail tracks in the cemetery were removed. The part of the London building which housed the LNC's offices survives today. The two stations in the cemetery remained open as refreshment kiosks for some years afterwards but were subsequently demolished. The site of the northern station, serving the Nonconformist cemetery, is now heavily overgrown. The site of the southern, Anglican, station is now the location of a Russian Orthodox monastery and a shrine to King Edward the Martyr, which incorporate the surviving station platform and the former station chapels.