For almost 100 years, the city ran a train service exclusively for the dead
In Ancient Greece, the dead would have coins placed over their eyes so they could pay the infernal boatman Charon to ferry them across the River Styx to their final resting place. In nineteenth century London, the dead would be brought a train ticket and ferried from Waterloo’s Necropolis Station to a purpose built cemetery 23 miles southwest in Brookwood, Surrey.
By the time of its inception in the mid-nineteenth century, London was in desperate need of more burial space. Just 218 acres of burial space within the city had to accommodate around 50,000 deaths every year. The situation was getting so critical, in fact, that it was becoming common practice to exhume rotting corpses at night and illegally cremate them to save up room for newcomers. Parliament eventually voted to ban new burials in the centre and divert funds to building necropolises in green spaces surrounding the city.
Brookwood Cemetery opened in 1854 with its station opening 10 years later. The latter provided a service to friends and family; unlike the journey across the Styx they had the option of going with them without also having to shuffle off their mortal coil. Typically in keeping with the British class system, first, second, or third class tickets were available both for the living and the dead (god forbid corpses of different classes should have to ride together)
Not everybody felt comfortable with the idea though. In 1842, the Bishop of London described the whole as “improper” and at odds with the solemnity that should characterise a Christian funeral. In 1902, a new railway station opened on Westminster Bridge Road to replace the old one. However, it wouldn’t stay in service for long. To a large extent, the mass influx of automobiles made trains redundant when it came to shipping the dead off for burial.
What really signalled the death knell of the endeavour, however, was the London Blitz in 1941, in which a German bomb tore through Necropolis Station. This marked the end of what a 1904 edition of Railway Magazine described as “the most peaceful railway service in the three corners of the kingdom.” What we can say for sure is that for 87 years, London ran the only service in the city’s history in which none of its passengers submitted a single complaint.