When science met the supernatural
The Victorian Age is indeed an interesting one, in many ways, not least in the scientific advances that have been largely forgotten and consigned to the waste bin (with a few exceptions) of history. One such invention is the Crystal Palace Pneumatic Railway, developed by engineer Thomas Webster Rammell (1814-79) to prove the viability of vacuum driven trains. Driven by steam generated compressed air, the vehicle could apparently speed across 550 yards of rail in just 50 seconds, at around 25mph.
A newspaper at the time suggested at launch that if the air pump system failed, passengers would die "like frogs under a vacuum pump."
Sudden subway train closure
Tickets for the tunnel trip cost sixpence each, with trains running between 1pm and 6pm; the journey time was 50 seconds. The line was in operation between 27th August 1864 to October 1864. No official reason was supposedly given for the sudden closure, although some speculated that the animal fat-coated bristle 'collar' at the back of the train (to stop the air escaping) was too enticing for vermin to resist, thus requiring expensive regular upkeep/replacement. Others simply posit that the downturn in the British economy at the time discouraged backers from sinking (sic) any more cash into the project.
Records do not state what happened after the line ceased to operate. An excavation was conducted at the site in August 1975, but only a small brick tunnel (too wee for a train), and a probable retaining wall were found. Some believe the actual running tunnel was demolished during preparations for the Festival of Empire celebrations in 1911.
Vacuum train prototypes
The Flight Rail Corporation in the United States built a 1/6 scale working prototype of the train to demonstrate their technology in practice. China, Brazil and Ghana have also experimented with atmospheric rail travel. Jakarta’s Taman Mini Indonesia Indah opened in 1989 but was converted to diesel in 2019.
Supernatural theory for the closure
Urban myth says the final train crashed in the tunnel and was buried, and was literally covered up. Rumors of ghostly presences of the passengers have lingered since the 1930s; in 1978, a woman walking her dog claimed to have fallen through the covered entrance to the tunnel, and saw a carriage crammed with skeletons decked out in Victorian clothing. But she never gave any proof of this and to this day, no carriage or skeletons have ever been found.
Four years earlier in 1974, an archaeological dig attempted to find the train but failed to turn up any evidence, although rumors abound of dead hands rising from the supposed site of the tunnel to grab the ankles of joggers.
An unrelated tale claims a track-maintenance worker was decapitated in one of the regular train tunnels at Crystal Palace and has been seen by many moping around the spot where he was beheaded.
Grand subway re-opening in 2024
A 14 year renovation of the Crystal Palace’s Victorian subway was completed in September 2024 and was reopened to the public on September 21, 2024 during the Open House London weekend, ahead of its 160th anniversary in 2025.
According to TimeOut, the project was funded in part by Historic England, City of London Strategic Investment Pot, and donations from individuals; part of a huge £17.5 million regeneration of Crystal Palace Park.
Sources include:
The Crystal Palace experiment may have inspired the motion picture DEATH LINE (1972). A group of Victorian railway workers constructing the deep tube tunnels at Russell Square station in 1892 survive a cave-in; their cannibal descendants still reside there.
Grave problems birthed a new train service
And there are other eerie London trainlines, such as The London Necropolis Railway: Where The Dead went Choo Choo
For centuries, London’s dead had been been buried in and around local churches, with the oldest graves exhumed to free up space for new burials. By the first half of the 19th century, the population of London more than doubled in 50 years; almost two and a half million in 1851. But the amount of land set aside for use as graveyards remained unchanged at approximately 300 acres; graveyards became increasingly congested. Decaying corpses contaminated the water supply and the city underwent frequent epidemics of cholera, smallpox, measles and typhoid. An 1842 Royal Commission reported London's burial grounds had become so packed that it was impossible to dig a new graves without slicing through old ones.
The 1848–49 cholera epidemic killed 14,601 people in London; the burial system was close to being overwhelmed. To combat this, the London Necropolis Railway opened in November 1854; created by the London Necropolis Company (LNC), to carry corpses and their mourners between London and newly opened Brookwood Cemetery, 23 miles (37 km) southwest of the capital in Brookwood, Surrey. Then the largest cemetery in the world, Brookwood Cemetery was designed to be large enough to accommodate all the deaths in London for hundreds of years to come, the LNC hoping to monopolise London's burials.
At the cemetery, the trains shunted to either of two stations; one for the burial of Anglicans and one for Nonconformists (non-Anglicans) – or those who simply did not want a Church of England funeral. Waiting rooms and the compartments of the train, both for living and for dead passengers, were divided by both religion and class, preventing mourners and corpses from different social backgrounds from intermingling.
How typically bloody English.
But the scheme was not as successful as its promoters had wished; they had planned to carry between 10,000 and 50,000 bodies every year, but by 1941, after 87 years, approximately 200,000 burials had taken place, only 2,300 bodies per annum.
The evening of 16th–17th April 1941, saw the London terminus bombed and made unusable by a Nazi air raid. The LNC still ran occasional funeral services from Waterloo station to Brookwood railway station north of the cemetery, their Necropolis Railway was abandoned. After the Second World War concluded, the remaining parts of the London station were sold off as offices, and the cemetery rail tracks removed.
So what happens to the dead in London now, as the population of the city is roughly 9 million souls?Crematoria, home burials, The Thames, taxidermy, and of course Soylent Green…I guess.
Incidentally, the southern, Anglican, station site is now home to a Russian Orthodox monastery and a shrine to King Edward the Martyr, which includes the surviving station platform and the former station chapels. Which is nice.
By the way, there are rumors of strange sounds and rituals at Brookwood cemetery, but nothing really than rumor and lollygagging, if the truth be told.
Charles Dickens and the Staplehurst rail disaster
And this eerie Dickens tale, inspired by the author’s own shocking experience with his mistress Ellen Ternan in the Kent Staplehurst rail crash which killed 10 people and injured a further 40. Unsurprisingly, Dickens was afterwards very nervous when travelling by train and used other means where possibly available. He died exactly five years after the accident; his son Henry said that 'he had never fully recovered'.
The effect of the Staplehurst accident "tells more and more," Dickens wrote in 1867; a year later he said, "I have sudden vague rushes of terror, even when riding in a hansom cab, which are perfectly unreasonable but quite insurmountable." His daughter Mamie recalled that "my father's nerves never really were the same again…we have often seen him, when travelling home from London, suddenly fall into a paroxysm of fear, tremble all over, clutch the arms of the railway carriage, large beads of perspiration standing on his face, and suffer agonies of terror. We never spoke to him, but would touch his hand gently now and then. He had, however, apparently no idea of our presence; he saw nothing for a time but that most awful scene."
Stephen Arnell’s novel THE GREAT ONE is now available on Amazon Kindle:
EXTRA: An American Werewolf in London (1981) Tottenham Court Road Tube Station
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