London Dungeon resurrects train line that carried corpses out of city

FOR almost a century, the London Necropolis Railway ran trains laden with dead bodies from its station in Waterloo to a cemetery in Surrey.

Now London Dungeon has resurrected the rail service as an attraction — and promises that the show will be its scariest yet.

The real service operated from 1854 until 1941 and took about 2,000 bodies a year from Waterloo to Brookwood cemetery in Surrey, west of Woking. Thousands of corpses were transported out of the capital because of overcrowding in its graveyards, hastened by a rapidly growing population and outbreaks of disease.

Visitors to the London Dungeon, on South Bank, are taken back to the 1850s as passengers on a “haunted” train carrying coffins and mourners.

The show, which opened this week, features a tormented conductor and more actors than any other London Dungeon attraction.

Richard Quincey, head of performance at the venue, said: “The guests are on the train carriage with the dead people, coffins and mourners.

“It’s a nugget of history that has never been told in Dungeon’s history and is set to be the scariest attraction yet.

“We’ve put a Dungeon twist on the story, it has a historical underpinning, but there’s more weight on the scare factor because we make scary, fun. We play on the scare factor so guests will feel a rollercoaster of emotions.

“It’s about creating an uneasy feeling from the moment you go into the set and then the surprises start to unravel.

“Every Halloween we try to notch up the scare factor and that’s what the guests are really craving in October. We want to hear the screams and then the laughs — it’s the London Dungeon touch where we play on fear and comedy.”

The Necropolis

Railway will run until November 6, taking its place alongside the London Dungeon’s take on 1,000 years of the capital’s darker history, including the Great Fire of 1666 and the 19th-century serial killer Jack the Ripper.