#london necropolis railway

[sixminutestoriesblog]

the London Necropolis

It was 1850 and London had a problem.

All right. London had a lot of problems in the 1850s. Thanks to the Industrial Revolution, London had seen its population boom so quickly that the city didn't have time to make room for everyone. Housing developments and slums sprang up seemingly overnight, cramming as many people into a warren of rooms, and partitioned off rooms. as could be fit. Poverty ran rampant, cholera outbreaks swept through districts regularly, the conditions in the factories, where small children were often also employed, were deadly and the environment itself was a lung-clogging morass of soot and sewage. Some made their fortunes and managed to rise through the layers of society but many simply hung on to the bottom rungs of it for as long as they could before their hands were wrenched off to make way for others. And that didn't just apply to the living.

The dead didn't know rest either.

It didn't take long for the graveyards of London to hit full capacity with the population influx. Even with the body snatchers, working to retrieve bodies for local hospitals and schools as well as even more unsavory employers almost as soon as the grieving family left the plot, couldn't keep up with the massive amount of bodies that needed to be buried in the local cemeteries week after week, month after month, year after year. The problem grew to the point that gravediggers, hitting older coffins would simply continue digging, tossing rotted wood and whatever body parts were left into the dirt pile behind them, making room for the newest arrival in the plot. Graves got so shallow that the bare layer of dirt over them easily washed away and utterly failed to keep what was slowly decaying in the boxes covered. Church goers learned to bring perfume covered handkerchiefs to Sunday services, if they were lucky, to hold over their noses the entire time, trying to blot out the smell seeping under the doors and into the confined interiors of the buildings. Flies and other, even more unpleasant, scavengers were impossible to get rid of, lured by the ease of a quick meal and a place to take up residence. Health inspectors, and many Londoners of the time, blamed the miasma rising from the graveyards for many of the disease outbreaks that swept through the city. Something had to be done.

An amendment was passed in 1852 prohibiting most new burials in the more populous sections of London. The problem was - where did you put the bodies then?

In 1832, the Magnificent Seven, seven large plots of land outside London, had been remade into cemeteries. One business group had higher aspirations than that though. In 1854, the Brookwood Cemetery, the largest cemetery of the time, opened for business. It soon became know by a different name.

The London Necropolis.

And the London Necropolis Railway was there to make sure everyone, dead and alive, found safe transportation there.

Railroads and their trains were still new at that time. Loud and noisy, belching steam and smoke into the air, trains weren't seen as a dignified way for the dead to travel to their final resting place and eternal peace. Worse yet, travel by train might lead to a mixing of the classes, dead as well as living (gasps of alarm and swooning!). Who wanted their sweet genteel maiden aunt's body to ride in the same cargo car as some low level rake's corpse?! Why it was undignified (and very against the social divisions of the time)! Even in death, standards must be applied.

Trains, however noisy and undignified, did offer a distinct advantage. They were cheap. And they ran regularly on a schedule you could plan around, daily in fact, including Sundays. As for social distinctions - well, the LNC had a solution for that too. Depending on the money you were willing to spend, the rail offered first, second, and third class funerals, with separate train cars for each class, living or dead. Knowing that most passengers from other stations would be reluctant to ride a train that had carried dead bodies, the LNC bought new cars and engines specifically for the job, kept separate from the other routes of train travel. They laid track specifically for the job as well, so that only the necropolis trains traveled to one of the two separate stations in Brookwood Cemetery. Mourners left the Waterloo Station in London and road the train, with their unique luggage, to either the Southern Anglican Station or the Northern Station, where the 'nonconformist' section of the burial plots were. While the trains originally only ran for funerals, enough mourners wanted to return for visits to the graves of their loved ones and eventually, after about ten years, the LNC built a third station for that purpose. Almost immediately, a small hub of shops and services sprang up around the new station to cater to, and prey on, the arriving mourners. For fifty years, until 1900, the funeral trains ran on schedule, ferrying bodies, and their loved ones, back and forth between London and the Necropolis. Even after that time, the trains still ran 'as needed' until, finally, in 1941 the London Necropolis station was bombed during the London Blitz. It was the final blow to an already declining system. The station was never rebuilt.

By the 1950s, funeral trains were almost obsolete and the last one in England carried its lonely cargo in 1979. By 1988, the British Railway didn't carry coffins anymore. Time, and more efficient methods, had passed the Necropolis funeral trains by. The tracks overgrew with weeds where they weren't torn up for scrap and the only wistful train whistle left to linger in the chill evening air at the grey and abandoned gates was the long, low ghost of a memory.

[laiqualaurelote]

new Dead Boy Detectives headcanon: this is the building where the boys have their office and nobody can tell me different now (it's even near Westminster Bridge, where Charles and Crystal take their walk)

also obviously the Necropolis Railway is still active for ghostly users so Charles and Edwin can hear the trains rattling while they're working (they figure it's a small price to pay for the excellent location) and sometimes they take the lift down and hitch a ride to Woking when they feel like a holiday. They and the other tenants are engaged in an ongoing haunting campaign to ensure the building never gets sold

[zippocreed501]

[haveyouheardthispodcast]

[jjminah]

i havent seen her inbox since the past two years

a new message

"ive been obsessed with this song lately"

so have i

[bad-moodboard]

The London Necropolis Railway, Westminster Bridge Road Entrance. 

[catilinas]

reading about the london necropolis railway again :-)

[bodhranwriting]

But There is No Road Through the Woods

An elderly forester, cursed with immortality, accepts the arduous task of guiding an eclectic troupe of travellers through the Lost Forest; a wilderness claimed by spirits, fae, and the undead. But as he struggles to keep his charges alive, he finds himself being reminded of his humanity and his long-buried desire to find something worth living – or dying – for.

The Lightning Herders

Barely a day after their move, a young family’s farm in rural Canada is trapped in a dangerous and never-ending thunderstorm. Determined to stop it, Third – an autistic aspiring inventor – sets out on a quest to uncover the many mysteries of her new home. Why is their landlord’s room glowing green and why does he have a chained chest under his bed? What does the destroyed angel monument have to do with anything? Is the forest truly full of ghosts?

But when another young girl falls out of the sky in an inexplicable flying machine, Third’s world suddenly gets a lot bigger. There is an entire domain of danger and magic above the clouds… and it’s all connected back to Third’s new home.

The London Necropolis Railway

A medium who spends his days secretly reassuring the departed on the Victorian railway to the graveyards beyond the city reunites with a childhood friend only to learn a feared necromancer has infiltrated the train and is putting deadly wheels into motion. Now it’s up to a man who jumps at his own shadow to hold his own amongst the living dead.

[comradecobalt]

[stephensmithuk]

The Naval Treaty

The twenty-second Sherlock Holmes short story, this was originally published in two parts in The Strand due to its length.

I am guessing Dantzig is a misspelling of Danzig, the city then in Germany and now Gdansk in Poland.

The Foreign Office is now known as the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, having absorbed two other ministries since the Second World War. It is of course Britain's equivalent of the Department of State.

"Fifth form" would be Year 11 or the 10th Grade in modern parlance.

Woking is the first stop for many express trains from Waterloo and can be reached in under half an hour by modern electric train.

The area is also home to the Brookwood Cemetery, a massive burial ground set up in 1852 to handle the large numbers of dead from London due to the burial grounds there being full up. It even had its own railway line (the London Necropolis Railway) and special station next to Waterloo, with special trains and different classes available. The dead could only get single tickets. The London terminus of the line was wrecked in the Blitz in 1941 and never reopened.

The excess land for this cemetry was sold off and used for housing, Woking had become a notable commuter town by this time.

The Triple Alliance was the alliance between Germany, Austria-Hungary and Italy signed in 1882; it ran with period renewals up until 1915, when Italy entered the First World War on the side of Britain, France and Russia. There were attempts to get the British to join it in 1891.

The FCDO main building in Whitehall sometimes opens some of its areas to the public and has an interior suitably designed to impress any foreign visitors.

The Coldstream Guards are a very long-standing regiment of the British Army, originally formed in 1650. It is one of the regiments tasked with protecting the monarchy, partly by standing very still in a pillbox, but has also fought in the majority of British wars to date.

The last peer to date to have been Foreign Secretary was Peter Carrington, who held the post under Margaret Thatcher from 1979 to 1982. He resigned after the Falklands invasion, taking responsibility for the failure to predict it, but later ended up NATO's Secretary General and died in 2018 aged 99.

[confoundedpangolin]

Podcast List (not recs, just podcasts)

this is really long and I'm still adding to it and I know most of them are story podcasts but I think a few are non fiction

The Vesta Clinic

Not Quite Dead

The Kingmaker Histories

Jar of Rebuke

Victoriocity

Fawx and Stallion

Desperado

The Night Post

Tell No Tales

Nowhere, On Air

Elixir

Tales From Low City

The Lost Cat Podcast

The Antique Shop

In Transit

The Dead Letter Office Of Somewhere, Ohio

The Sound Museum

Bodies in Space

Wooden Overcoats

Middle: Below

City of Ghosts

Girl in Space

Do You Copy?

Elaine's Cooking For The Soul

Kakos Industries

SINKHOLE

What's the Frequency

Unwell

Olive Hill

Night Shift Podcast

Midnight Radio

London Necropolis Railway

Hannahpocalypse

The Far Meridian

The Hacker Chronicles

Don’t Mind Cruxmont

Hello From The Hallowoods

The Magnus Archives

Welcome To Night Vale

Alice Isn't Dead

Archive 81

Wolf 359

Ars Paradoxica

The Silt Verses

Malevolent

Red Valley

Woe.Begone

Camp Here And There

I Am In Eskew

Hi Nay

The Scarab Archives

The White Vault

EOS 10

Batman Unburied

Where the Stars Fell

Violent Femme

Re: Dracula

Tiny Terrors

36 Questions

The Edge Of Sleep

The Bright Sessions

The Cellar Letters

That Vampire Show

Spirit Box Radio

Old Gods of Appalachia

Neighbourly Podcast

Mayfair Watchers Society

Midnight Burger

DnDaddies

Death By Dying

The Mistholme Museum of Mystery, Morbidity, and Mortality

Stellar Firma

Ghost Wax

Clockwork Bird

The Strange Case of Starship Iris

SCP: Find Us Alive

In Strange Woods

The Adventure Zone

Lights Out

Three of Hearts

On A Dark, Cold Night

Radio Rental

Limetown

Scared To Death

The Black Tapes

The Town Whispers

13 Days Of Halloween

[ghostbellies]

HNGHGH YA’LL. i am, SO. EXCITED. here he is, designed by me and modeled by the incomparable Mr_Mengine on Twitter!!!!

i wanna introduce the London Necropolis Railway M7 tank engine, No 141…aka Rook <3

Rook is a soft spoken, low energy, rather formal little tank engine with something of a morbid streak. but wouldn’t you too if you worked as a train that only carried the dead to be laid to rest?

Rook loves poetry, rainy days, and the quiet dignity of cemeteries. He tends to call everyone ‘sir’ or ‘ma’am’ (or your title of choice, ofc). dont let his morose looks fool you though, he DOES have a sense of humor of the gallows variety, which can catch the other engines off guard, as he usually doesn’t do much laughing and cutting up…but when he does it tends to be…chilling.

He is a hard (if a tad slow) worker who takes pride in his job, and is equally happy shunting loads of caskets and embalming fluid or carrying the ornate black coaches full of the bereaved and the deceased. He is protective and gentle with his crew. He seems to have a close bond with them, presumably as he’s so used to carrying the dead; he enjoys the time spent with them having a good wash down, or the sleepy morning hours before his fire is stoked.

He can be fussy about his appearance - he’s sensitive about his prodigious nose and lazy eye that he tends to keep closed…even at the expense of losing depth perception.

ANYWAY…TL;DR: this is No 141 Rook. he’s a weird lil tank engine who happily pulls the funeral train. he likes making inappropriate jokes about death and having his boiler patted. do not make fun of his big nose, plz, he will sulk U uU

[zippocreed501]

London went into state of rapid expansion during the 19th century - both in geographical terms and in the growth of its population. These two factors resulted in one unfortunate problem; the city began to run out of burial sites. The previous space-saving idea of 'stacking' unrelated deceased people on top of each other and reducing the amount of earth covering graves failed. (Heavy rain led to exposed caskets and corpses). London belonged to the living and so plans were made for large cemeteries to be built outside the city borders. Transportation of the dead to these graveyards would come courtesy of The London Necropolis Railway.

The service ran from 1854 to 1941. Mourners were provided with carriages and ferried to graveyards far from where their loved ones had lived.

As in all UK history, class played its part. The upper classes - living and dead - were given private carriages. This was mirrored in the cemeteries, where the poor were interred away from the lawns and flowerbeds of the rich.

The former London Necropolis Railway station building as it is today.

[christiangittingsblog]

The london Necropolis Railway

The london Necropolis Railway From Waterloo to eternity and back //interesting articles about the Necropolis Railway,, that took London's dead and mourners, from Waterloo station in London to Brookwood Cemetery in Surrey

[sisaloofafump]

Fiction podcasts as random images I have saved to my phone part 1

What’s the Frequency?

The Two Princes

Greater Boston

The Penumbra Podcast (Juno Steel)

The London Necropolis Railway

The Penumbra Podcast (Second Citadel)

Crossing Wires

Alice Isn’t Dead

The Lost Cat Podcast

King Falls AM

Hhhh I have more and they are on their way