Neatorama readers are familiar with Colma, the town built as a graveyard to store San Francisco's dead when the city ran out of room around 1900. The same thing happened even earlier in London. Even though Europe's burial practices included exhuming the dead so that graves could be used again, there was a limit to how many could be interred at once. London decided to solve the problem by opening a huge graveyard outside the city.
As a result a proposal was drawn up to use the emerging technology of mechanised transport to resolve the crisis. The scheme entailed buying a single very large tract of land around 23 miles from London to be called the London Necropolis (now Brookwood Cemetery). At this distance, the land would be far beyond the maximum projected size of the city's growth. If the practice of only burying a single family in each grave were abandoned and the traditional practice for pauper burials of ten burials per grave were adopted, the site was capable of accommodating 28,500,000 bodies. Even with the prohibition of mass graves it would take over 350 years to fill a single layer of this monstrous cemetery!
Using parts of the existing London and South Western Railway, trains could ship bodies and mourners from London to the site easily and cheaply. Its founders envisaged dedicated coffin trains, each carrying 50–60 bodies, travelling from London to the new Necropolis in the early morning or late at night, and the coffins being stored on the cemetery site until the time of the funeral. Mourners would then be carried to the appropriate part of the cemetery by a dedicated passenger train during the day.
The scheme found widespread support, although the Bishop of London considered it inappropriate that the families of people from very different backgrounds would potentially have to share a train, and felt that it demeaned the dignity of the deceased for the bodies of respectable members of the community to be carried on a train also carrying the bodies and relatives of those who had led immoral lives.
The new cemetery opened in 1854. Funerals and transport varied in price depending on one's station in life. Read about the rise and fall of London's Necropolis Railway at HistoryASM. -via Strange Company