Waterloo Station: London's Forgotten Railway For the Dead

Beneath Waterloo Station lies the forgotten history of a dedicated railway that carried London's dead to the world's largest cemetery for eighty-seven years. The London Necropolis Railway, born from a Victorian burial crisis that saw bodies stacked twenty deep in overflowing churchyards, operated a daily funeral train from a private terminus beside Waterloo to Brookwood Cemetery in Surrey, segregating the dead by class and religion even in transit. It survived commercial failure, two world wars, and the rise of the motor car, before being destroyed by a single night of Luftwaffe bombing in 1941. The building that served as its final station still stands on Westminster Bridge Road. Most people walk past it without a second glance.