"The Necropolitan." ...well who else could come up with that? Nice one, Jago. Have had a morbid curiosity with this line for years. DownUnder here in Melbourne, our Victoria Market is built over the original city cemetery. A carpark now covers the less wealthy stiffs whose descendants didn't have the means to relocate them to the now overcrowded General Cemetery... 👻
Once the Melbourne General Cemetery in Carlton and suburban cemeteries were nearly full, the Springvale cemetery was built with its own branch off the Gippsland main line. At the end of the branch there was a special station for mourners. The Fawkner cemetery was also strategically placed surrounding the railway extending north from Coburg. So while Melbourne is only 2/3 the size of London, it also had a couple of similar stations.
The Necropolis and its railway have been covered several times on TV, including one of Michael Portillo's jaunts, but Jago managed to pack in a lot more information and some beautiful photography. Well worth watching even if you've seen previous coverage.
"Return fares weren't available." I, for one, am very relieved about that. But by far the best smileworthy comment was "The Necropolitan". Fine form, Mr. Hazzard. Fine form, indeed.
It wasn't the cough that carried him off, it was the coffin they carried him off in. I thought that the necropolis was the dead centre of London but now I know better - thank you Jago
Good Lord, can you imagine how massive a nationwide cemetery for the whole of Britain would have been had that come to pass? A vast landscape of greenery under a heavenly sky, with gravestones and monuments stretching as far as the eye could see, the monotony occasionally broken by little chapels. That would have been an incredible sight.
My first thought when Jago mentioned it was that it would be a massive sod to get to for almost anyone wanting to visit a grave, which is surely the main point in having actual marked graves for the dead. (Leaving aside religious arguments, which I don't know anything about.)
there would only be few places in the entire country where you could build it,would have to be on ground useless for farming and far away from any cities urban growth area
Interestingly there was a somewhat similar railway in Berlin although it was built a bit later (finally opened in 1913 after first plans/proposals were already made in 1872 ...) It´s called the "Friedhofsbahn" (literally: cemetary railway) which ultimately lasted until august 1961 when the "Berlin Wall" was erected. The line end (Stahnsdorf station) was on GDR territory and became inaccessible for anyone (dead or alive) from West-Berlin. Btw.: Abandoned parts of the track still exist to date ...
Read once somewhere that Brookwood was especially popular (so to speak) with actors, musicians, and stagehands, since it was one of a very few cemeteries in London that performed burials on Sundays - some Music Hall type performers would do as many as two-three shows a day, six days a week, and Sunday would have been their only day off because theatres were closed on Sundays. And so there's a fairly large contingent of the 19th-century London stage that ended up there.
If you happen to find yourself at Brookwood station, if you leave the southbound platform down the stairs and turn right at the bottom of those stairs, you will leave the station into the cemetery and there is a section of the old necropolis track with information about it.
I have seen many many videos on this subject and this is one of the best. Apart from Jago’s slightly cynical commentary which I love, I am always impressed with the research he does and getting the level of detail right. I did not know that the remaining entrance was not the original one for example.
In the US a number of streetcar and interurban companies had specialized funeral car to run the departed and mourners to cemeteries on the line. J.G.Brills 1910 catalogue shows many styles, from 4 wheel trailers to very large cars with provision for two coffins. There is one car surviving that I know of: Descanso at the Southern California Railway Museum(formerly Orange Empire).
Fascinating! One of my fave creepy London stories. About 15 years ago, myself and a mate went to explore the station near Waterloo, we managed to get round the back where the morgue has been turned into a storage firm, the blokes running it gave us a tour of the huge areas where the coffins would have been stacked. So interesting! Happy Halloween 👻
The passengers had to travel at the same class as the dead. You could not send the late departed passenger 3rd Class and treat the living waiting to depart to 1st Class. Brookwood is a great place to visit and was saved by one Ramadan Güney to live again as a place to bury the dead. My mum and dad lie there.
A great video! Honorary mention of Queen Victoria’s last journey: in February 1901 her body travelled from the Isle of Wight to Windsor by train. Curiously, her coffin arrived to Waterloo and then the procession followed to Paddington from where the journey to Windsor commenced - despite the direct railway link from Waterloo to Windsor. This was probably arranged to allow the funeral procession in London.
many years ago,that 109 westminster bridge road used to be a post office,and i used to drive in to there ,push the button for the turn-table to turn the p.o. van round,and if you looked up could see all the old stuff up there.
My first wife and I did a lot of our courting in Brookwood Cemetery and picnics on the platform of the North Station were a regular part of that. The Cemetery itself is well worth a day out, for the architecture of tombs, the sheer scale of the place and the tranquility. I never found it morbid, death is, after all, the only thing in life that is guaranteed...
I used to have regular appointments at a place on Dufferin Street and walked through Bunhill Fields from City Road. I liked looking at the ancient headstones, although on some of them the dedication could not be read.
Sydney's Central Railway Station (the terminus for country trains as well as being on many suburban lines) was built on the site of a cemetery. Most remains were reburied elsewhere, but some were recently found (and identified) during work to expand the station. You may be interested to research that. Also there's a beautiful old building nearby called Mortuary Station which had a similar story to this video but in Sydney's case connected to Rookwood, not Brookwood
I have been to Central many times when visiting Australia and Sydney. This new discovery was reported in the uk media a few days ago. I hope Australia returns to normal one day to enable another visit. Thanks for the info and it would make an interesting video if Jago did do a historical video on this.
The Sydney Mortuary Station is also known as Regent Street. A mirror image copy of it was built at the Rookwood Cemetery end. When the line was closed in 1948, the Rookwood Cemetery Station No.1 was dismantled and transported stone by stone to Canberra, where it's now All Saints Church.
@@andrewgwilliam4831 You won't recognise it if you go back. Big $s being spent on construction of a new Central Walk under the suburban platforms, new concourse for the Metro and a new roof and open concourse over platforms 8-15
A morbidly fascinating subject, Jago; one I'm a bit surprised you hadn't covered until now. 7:30 Ah, now there's a name that jumps right out at me. One of Drummond's most famous locomotive designs (the Caledonian Railway Single No.123; now preserved at Glasgow's Riverside Muesum as one of only 3 surviving CR locomotives) was a noted player in the 1888 'Race to the North'. He was also a expert witness to the Tay Bridge disaster (one of his engines was due to take the train that fell with the bridge, but it had broken down and had to be replaced by one designed by Thomas Wheatley; this engine was recovered, repaired and returned to service and thereafter was known by engine crews as 'The Diver') in 1880.
The Scottish trains that ran on Sundays back then were generally so disreputable that some passengers might have been impressed to see 224, an impressive 4-4-0 at the head of the train. She was the Dundee relief that day, taking the place of an 0-4-2 tank engine called 'Ladybank', which, as you correctly state, was designed by Drummond.
Please do cover the other service as it is hardly known about. I thought you were very restrained with the punnage. Well done covering a touchy subject so well.
I wasn't aware of this railway until I read "The Necropolis Railway" by Andrew Martin. Since then I've researched various sources and been none the wiser.., and then your video comes along and explains it all perfectly. Very well done sir!!
Baltimore had a streetcar connection to one its cemeteries,and a couple of Interurbans ran cemetery trains out of Chicago,plus the Elevated Company had a converted car for that use! Later made into a medical car! Something you didn't see every day,or night either! Thanks for another interesting video,Jago 😀!!
You might be interested to know that there used to be a similar service - le Tramway de Loyasse - that went up to the Loyasse cemetery on the Fourvière Hill in the centre of the French city of Lyon. The viaduct is still there and it's now a footbridge.
Great stuff as always, sir. Used to live in Woking and worked at the Sainsburys in Brookwood/Knaphill, funnily enough built on top of the old loony bin you mentioned. Some buildings were saved and turned into houses and flats and you can clearly tell as they have huge windows.
That tower cemetery idea at 1:42 reminded me of the cemetery I visited in Hong Kong with a Chinese family who were paying their respects to passed-on relatives. It was on a series of ridges or steppes,one directly after another,on a hillside,with a strip of ground for groups of people to move along in front of a long line of graves side-by-side on each one. Such an arragement was necessary because of the lack of available land space,and its sheer cost,there. I was also with them on viewings of a few high rise apartments as they were considering buying one (one was on about the 60th floor). As none of those came cheap,and neither does the cost of buying or renting a burial plot,the Chinese chap who brought me with him there told me that "the most expensive things to do in Hong Kong are to live and to die".
For many years of commuting into Waterloo and having to wait for our train to be allowed onto its platform, I used to look at that junction, just out of Waterloo station and wonder what it was for/ why it was there. I only heard about the Necropolis line more recently. Thank you for that comprehensive history. Isn't it strange how we are not even free of the British social class system after death.
Over the years I've seen so many videos on the Necropolis railway and this video still is fresh. Well done Mr Hazzard. Is that a coffee cup? Please take your Hazzardous waste when disembarking. I just thought of that!
Brookwood cemetery was enormous. My father, until his death, lived in a house on an unadopted road owned by the cemetery. It took twenty minutes by car from his house to my mother's grave in the cemetery. This cemetery was the subject of deeply unsettling corruption case, involving the owner's common-law wife and a very corrupt police senior office. There was talk of deadly doings.
A former colleague lived in Brookwood across the mainline from the Cemetery. His wife, who was from Thailand, was concerned by the proximity of the cemetery but he reassured her that ghosts couldn’t cross the railway because of the third rail!
The Kings Cross fire, I came out of the station 10 minutes before the fire engines began to arrive. One theory for how it started was a still smouldering cigarette butt was dropped on to the escalator, which then found its was on to pile of flammable debris which had accumulated underneath. The rest. as they say, was history. London Transport then banned smoking on the Underground to prevent a repeation of the disaster
I am here due to the video of June 2024, and I am lucky to be able to watch this. Jago, you are literarily at your best here! Thank you for a lot of morbid humour. You are the hilarity for my morbidity, if I may be so bold.
Excellent and I’m sure my old friend John Clarke would endorse this comprehensive video of the Necropolis Railway. John took it a stage further once he completed the book he made a working model of the line.🙏
When the PRR Broadway Limited & NYC Twentieth Century Limited used to race each other east of Englewood, one of them would win. But when the funeral trains raced, they were always tied in a… dead heat.
The original Nunhead Junction (1871) was sited to provide access to Nunhead Cemetery, one of the Big Seven, albeit thirty years after the cemetery was opened. Services for the deceased operated for a while until the station was re-sited the other side of Gibbon Road in 1924.
Brookwood station has a somewhat different place in my memories. It's the station for what was the Guard's Depot (that's Guards as in Army rather than railway or stagecoach).
Sydney had a contemporary Mortuary Station adjacent to Central Station. The Heritage Listed platform still exists, featuring beautiful gothic sandstone arches. Destination was Rookwood Cemetery. Back then, in the 'countryside'. Interesting to learn where this piece of Australia's history most likely had its conceptual origins. Funfact: Old Aussie slang for being very sick, likely to die = "As crook as Rookwood".
I was gonna ask you to cover this but I thought, no hang on, this is Jago! He's no 8 bit train enthusiast, he tries to flog me VPNs whilst making me laugh every time a video goes up. Awesome to see your following growing and along for the ride! Stay safe :) P.S. Eagerly anticipation the next blurb of Holmes and Watson.
Excellent ! . . . When I saw the title I thought . . . Oh No ! . . . not the necropolis railway story AGAIN, it's already been done to death. . . . However, you've told the story in a fresh and interesting way, plus, I wasn't aware there was an earlier necropolis station at Waterloo until I saw this ! . . . Thanks for highlighting something new . . . to me at least !
@@JagoHazzard And what better way to accompany it, than by 'Black Train' by Scurravagus? The crew is made up of The Four Railwaymen of the Apocalypse: it's the Grim Sleeper. To put it another way, the Black Train is a metaphor for death.... ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-XYKRG7Md4Io.html
Rookwood Necropolis in the Sydney suburb of Lidcombe was served by a railway line until the late 1940s. The original station in Sydney is still standing next to Central station. The main receiving station at the cemetery was later moved to Canberra where it became the Anglican church in the suburb of Ainslie.
I started on the railway as a guard in 1994. We were shown a locked compartment on a train that instead of seating had two benches. We were told that they were for coffins for delivery to London cemeteries (the train was an old electric unit from London)
Very interesting take on the Stiffs Express railway! As usual packed with information and a good bit of humour thrown in. Great photography too. Thanks.
Wonderful, as always, Mr Hazzard. Dry wit, full of facts and great social history. I wonder, however, what is going through the minds of the 10 people who have given this a thumbs down - what is not to like?
The original burial practise in Britain, prior to the industrial revolution, were for an initial interment until the bones defleshed, then removal to a private crypt, the church crypt or (for the poorest) a bone cellar. Hamlet's Gravedigger is bringing up the bones of Yorick for such a final disposal.
Thank you Jago, the Necropolis line has been of a great fascination to me for a long time and while lockdown happened myself and my partner took the chance to visit the terminus end and was just amazed at how expansive the entire area was.
If the concept doesn't creep you out, all of the 'magnificent seven' and Brookwood (particularly the military section) are worth a visit. Highgate houses notables including Douglas Adams, Malcolm McLaren and, of course, Karl Marx.
Sydney has its necropolis/cemetery at Rookwood which was once served by a train line from Mortuary Station aka Regent Street Railways Station not far from Central Station. Both stations are closed. There used to be a pancake restaurant aboard a couple of the coaches.
Interesting video. Looking forward to the coverage of the other company, I've heard the station they constructed is briefly visible in the film 'The Ladykillers'. Something I do hope you cover one day is the London deep level shelters, it's known that consideration was given at the time of construction of using them to create a 'deep District line', but I'd love to know if any concrete plans were drawn up. From what I do know the shelter tunnels were designed as running tunnels, not station tunnels.
A bit of confusion regarding the deep level District here... that was in fact a completely different scheme, running from Earl's Court to Mansion House IIRC (could be wrong there) as an express route with only a couple of intermediate stops. Work was begun but abandoned after a short time. The shelters to which you refer were built under the Northern and, yes, it was envisaged they could be incorporated as part of a Northern express service but of course that never happened. The excellent book, "Rails Through The Clay" (ISBN 185414 151 1) covers both schemes. I'm assuming it's still in print... I have a copy of the second edition and would expect that a newer edition has been printed to incorporate the JLE to Stratford.
On a related note, the Poet John Clare never travelled by train in his lifetime living in much simpler (and probably impoverished) times. He did however travel by train for his funeral.
Rather like Queen Victoria travelled many times by train but liked speed limited to 40 mph. She died at Osborne House and was conveyed back to London for her funeral, but the connecting boat was late and Edward VII told them they could make up lost time. So her final journey by train was considerably her fastest.
That was dead good 👍 Fascinating railway. I was utterly intrigued by it when I first learnt of it in a book covering the history of the LSWR in the late 90s, and it was more than deserving of getting the Jago treatment 😎 Not sure if you were going to cover the station to the north of Kings X, but I am sure there was actually a model of it that I saw some time ago now, which featured the LNER main line 🤔 The necropolis are truly ghoulishly fascinating 👍🍀🍻
Two songs spring to mind while watching this video. The First an old music hall song called "Sewer" (or "They're removing granddads grave to build a sewer")I first heard the very fine Peter Sellers version. The Second is "Third Class Coffin" from Steam Punk (and the emphasis is punk) band, "The Men That Will Not Be Blamed for Nothing " who make a habit of writing songs about Victorian subjects (and several are rather good). It is specifically about this railway.
Here's a third, rather newer one for you: 'Black Train' by Scurravagus. The crew is made up of The Four Railwaymen of the Apocalypse: it's the Grim Sleeper. To put it another way, the Black Train is a metaphor for death.... ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-XYKRG7Md4Io.html
Really excited to see this covered! I have a copy of a 1980s RMT handbook setting out in great detail the financial allowances each grade of employee could have for transporting the remains of a loved one.
As you may have guessed, Dugald Drummond was a Scot, with quite an interesting portfolio. He designed locomotives for the Highland Railway, then the LBSCR, then the NBR, then the Caledonian Railway, before ending his career at the LSWR. Another Scot buried at Brookwood had a somewhat less auspicious career, Doctor Robert Knox. Who he? Well, when serial killers (not grave robbers) Burke and Hare carried out Edinburgh's notorious West Port Murders, it was for financial gain by supplying fresh corpses to the city's Royal College of Surgeons, for anatomy classes. Dr Knox was the man who would pay the murderers for the cadavers, no questions asked. This led to Edinburgh children playing chanting a rather macabre rhyme; Doon the close and up the stair, mind yir back for Burke and Hare; Burke's the butcher, Hare's the thief, Knox the man wha buys the beef. When the two were caught and tried, Hare turned King's evidence. Burke was convicted, and the Edinburgh judiciary deciding to make an example of him, and to "let the punishment fit the crime", after hanging his body was used in an anatomy class, and thereafter his skeleton was donated to the Royal College of Surgeons, where it can be seen to this day, along with his death mask (Edinburgh Police also had notebooks covered with Burke's skin). Amazingly, Dr Knox was completely exonerated and never arrested or charged. His reputation however was completely destroyed. Students would refuse to attend his classes or lectures, and it was not long before the college dispensed with his services. Considered toxic by the Scottish medical fraternity, no hospital, college, or university would employ Knox. So it was that he moved to London, to take up a post with the London Cancer Hospital, and stayed in London for the rest of his days.
In case nobody else has mentioned it, Rookwood (yes, with no B) Necropolis in Sydney, Australia, is the largest cemetary in the Southern Hemisphere, according to some sources the largest in the world, the other contender being Moscow, I believe. It's so big it has its own postcode. From 1887 to 1967 it had it's own short branchline from the adjacent Lidcome station on the main line, ending in an elabourate church-like two platform terminal station. So church-like that when the line was closed the station building was taken apart and rebuilt (mirror imaged) as a church in Canberra, where it stands today. The Mortuary Station at Regent Street, just to the western side of the station throat into Sydney Central Terminal Station, was the starting point of the journey. That's still there, has been restored and is used for film, promotional and other purposes.
Proper snort over 'the Necropolitan', but I came here to say this railway is possibly the only one to have a song written about it by London scamps The Men That Will Not Be Blamed For Nothing - 'Third Class Coffin' from 'Not Your Typical Victorians'. Top work as ever.
Great video and very informative, since I found out about this rail line some years ago I have been looking forward to the time that Jago would cover it.
I understand that ticket checks were carried out in the hearse carriages as relevant travel tickets were attached to the stacked caskets. Any found without tickets were removed from the train just prior to Surbiton and were buried next to the line in unmarked plots. This area became known to locals and railway staff alike as Bury Lands but house developers in the 1920's renamed it Berrylands. This is, of course, nonsense 😀, as was the plan to call the Necropolis station at Brookwood "Figh Knoll Destination" and the arrangements to unload coffins of the saintly from trains on the up line (bound for heavenly tenure) and those who did not qualify for such elevation from trains on the down line (where eternal steam heating was ensured).
Let's hope people read the whole of your message and not the visible first few lines only, otherwise we could be having another Internet urban myth starting.
There were funeral trains in NSW, Australia, the busiest was from Mortuary Station in Sydney slightly west of the current Central station, out to Rookwood in West Sydney. One of the station buildings at Rookwood was eventually demolished and rebuilt as All Saints Anglican Church, in Ainslie, Canberra.
What a jolly tale of civic mindedness. I take it one of the shots was filmed when the D. of E. popped his cloggs- the flag is at half mast. I can't wait for the video on the other er Necropolitain railway. Its amazing that pun never got into general usage. It's so perfect that people would kill for it. Maybe the did.
There used to be a railway within the confines of Manor Park cemetery. My grandfather, grandmother, and numerous other relatives are buried in the family plot. As an aside my grandfather worked as a shunter in Stratford goods yard during the blitz . I met his fireman at my mother's funeral
@@highpath4776 it was primarily The City of London Cemetery but it was out in Manor Park presumably as there wasn't any land available nearer to the City. It has quite a large Jewish cemetery within its confines
Jago, I find your videos fascinating and very engaging. I especially love the fact you can interject humour into such subjects with an honest opinion on various related matters. It makes for a refreshing approach. It would be very nice if you could do a video about the other funeral service, this video has left me most intrigued on what is a little known subject outside of very dedicated enthusiasts.
