It was a difficult time to be alive in 1848 London, and worse still to be dead.
But there was one problem: there was no space to bury.
The population of London was soaring.
In 1801, the city had less than a million people living.
In 1851, that figure had more than doubled to almost two and a half million.
The old corpses were crumpled and scattered contaminating the soil and water supply resulting in fresh bouts of epidemics.
Cholera, smallpox, measles, typhoid were pervasive in Victorian London.
A third class coffin ticket issued to passengers of the London Necropolis Railway.
Instead, a series of new cemeteries were to be established far outside the city.
The 37-km journey had no stops and took 40 minutes to cover.
Like regular passenger trains, the Necropolis train had classes.
A first class ticket allowed the family to choose where they wanted to inter the dead within the cemetery.
They could also erect a permanent memorial over the grave.
The third class was for pauper funerals.
A map showing the location of various cemeteries planned outside London to tackle the burial crises.
The red line indicates the route of the London Necropolis Railway from London to the Brookwood Cemetery.
Image credit:iridescent/Wikimedia
Proposed solutions to the burial crisis, 1852.
The necropolis railway never took off in the way the London Necropolis Company had hoped.
In 1902, the daily train service was ended because of lack of passengers, running only on demand.
By the 1930s it was unusual for the trains to operate more than twice a week.
By then, the trains had run for 87 years transporting slightly over 200,000 dead bodies.
Only a few reminders of this morbid railway service remain today.
The two stations in the cemetery were demolished during the 1960s and the ruins later caught fire.
The tracks were long since lifted away to be melted or reused elsewhere.
Although unusual, the London Necropolis Railway wasnt the only railway in the world dedicated to dead passengers.
In Berlin, the Friedhofsbahn (Cemetery Line) operated from 1913 until 1952.
There was a similar railway in Finland.
It was demolished after the new station was built in 1902.
The necropolis railway train, shown here in 1907, approaches North Station at Brookwood Cemetery.
Photo credit:Nedueb/Wikimedia
The overgrown ruins of Brookwood North station.
Photo credit:iridescent/Wikimedia
Brookwood Station, opened in 1864, still serves train passengers today.
Photo credit:Paul Smith/Wikimedia
South (cemetery-side) entrance to Brookwood railway station, Surrey.
Photo credit:iridescent/Wikimedia
Sources:Wikipedia/BBC/www.transporttrust.com
