page_title: London Necropolis Railway
section_title: Locomotives
hierarchical_section_title: London Necropolis Railway / Rolling stock / Locomotives
caption_attribution_description: English: Network 150 Day - (11) LSWR Class M7 tank loco No. 245 (front view)
context_page_description: The London Necropolis Railway was a railway line opened in November 1854 by the London Necropolis Company, to carry corpses and mourners between London and the LNC's newly opened Brookwood Cemetery 23 miles southwest of London in Brookwood, Surrey. At the time the largest cemetery in the world, Brookwood Cemetery was designed to be large enough to accommodate all the deaths in London for centuries to come, and the LNC hoped to gain a monopoly on London's burial industry. The cemetery had intentionally been built far enough from London so as never to be affected by urban growth and was dependent on the recently invented railway to connect it to the city.
  The railway mostly ran along the existing tracks of the London and South Western Railway but had its own branches from the main line at both London and Brookwood. Trains carried coffins and passengers from a dedicated station in Waterloo, London, onto the LSWR tracks. On reaching the cemetery, the trains reversed down a dedicated branch line to two stations in the cemetery, one for the burial of Anglicans and one for Nonconformists or those who did not want a Church of England funeral.
context_section_description: Under the terms of the 1852 agreement and Act of Parliament establishing the London Necropolis Company, the LSWR (after 1923 the SR) provided the locomotives and crew for London Necropolis Railway operations. There was no dedicated LNC locomotive, and the trains were worked by whichever suitable engine happened to be available. (Before the 1864 improvements to Necropolis Junction, locomotives rarely entered the cemetery branch line itself and the trains were generally hauled along the branch line by horses.) Towards the end of the railway's operations in the 1930s the route was almost always worked by LSWR M7 class locomotives, usually No. 255.
caption: An LSWR M7 class locomotive of the type used on the London Necropolis Railway in its last decade of operations
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