Book
The Necropolis Railway
First published 2002
London, 1903. Young railway enthusiast Jim Stringer leaves Yorkshire determined to make a career on the footplate and finds work connected with the London Necropolis Railway, the extraordinary service carrying coffins and mourners from Waterloo to Brookwood Cemetery. The job is less promising than he imagined: his fellow railwaymen dislike him, his predecessor has vanished and the graveyard line is surrounded by rumours and unease.
Jim begins asking questions about the missing man and the hostility within the railway community, turning his fascination with locomotives into an amateur investigation. The novel uses the actual Necropolis Railway and the smoke, hierarchy and working practices of Edwardian railway life to frame a mystery about ambition, secrecy and the dangers concealed inside an apparently orderly system.
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