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A funeral train is a train specially chartered in order to carry a coffin or coffins to a place of interment. Funeral trains today are often reserved for leaders and national heroes, as part of a state funeral, but in the past were sometimes the chief means of transporting coffins and mourners to graveyards. Funeral trains remain mostly steam locomotive hauled, due to the more romantic image of the steam train against more modern diesel or electric locomotives. ==History== The first funeral train was run by The London Necropolis and National Mausoleum Company on 7 November 1854. Trains ran once a day from London Necropolis railway station to Brookwood Cemetery. The train carried not only the bodies of the dead, but the parties of mourners who had come to attend the funeral services. Different classes were available for both the living and the dead; a more expensive first class ticket would provide a more ornate coffin and greater care of the body during transit. The London Necropolis Railway was run on the tracks of the London and South Western Railway, who feared that regular passengers would shun locomotives which had previously hauled funeral trains, and therefore purchased an entirely new fleet exclusively for the Necropolis line. The public were initially reserved about the project; one bishop expressed fears that "It may sometimes happen that persons of opposite characters might be carried in the same conveyance. For instance, the body of some profligate spendthrift might be placed in a conveyance with the body of some respectable member of the church, which would shock the feelings of his friends".〔(The Deathline ) - ''Fortean Times'' (Registration required). URL accessed 11 November 2006〕 Others felt that the railway industry, which was less than 20 years old and still very much a new technology, was too hectic and loud, ill-befitting the sombre mourning associated with Christian funeral services. The line ran daily – including Sundays – for almost 50 years until 1900, when the Sunday service was stopped and trains began to run on an "as needed basis". The railway remained in operation through the First World War and Second World War until 16 April 1941, when the London Necropolis station was bombed in the London Blitz. The station was never rebuilt and the line fell into disuse.〔(The Cemetery Railway ). URL accessed 11 November〕 When West Norwood railway station opened two years later it was sited near to the gates of South London Metropolitan Cemetery, founded twenty years earlier; pall-bearers would unload the coffin from its "Funeral special" and simply carry it from the side entrance to the main gates. While this practice is long discontinued, the side gates still remain. Following the 1947 nationalisation of Britain's railways, the use of the railway to transport coffins went into steep decline. New operating procedures required that coffins be carried in a separate carriage from other cargo; as regular services to Brookwood station used electric multiple unit trains which did not have goods vans, coffins for Brookwood had to be shipped to Woking and then carried by road for the last part of the journey, or a special train had to be chartered. The last railway funeral to be carried by British Rail anywhere was that of Lord Mountbatten in September 1979, and from 28 March 1988 British Rail formally ceased to carry coffins altogether. Since Mountbatten, the only railway funeral to be held in the United Kingdom has been that of former National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers General Secretary Jimmy Knapp, carried from London to Kilmarnock for burial in August 2001. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Funeral train」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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