Mortuary Station

Sydney built a train station exclusively for dead people, and they made it gorgeous. This ornate Gothic sandstone building was the departure lounge for funeral trains -- from eighteen sixty-nine to nineteen twenty-nine, coffins were loaded here and transported by rail to Rookwood Cemetery, about sixteen kilometres west. Trains departed at nine-thirty in the morning and two-thirty in the afternoon, daily. You booked your dead loved one a ticket, accompanied the coffin on the train, attended the burial, and caught the train home.

The architect James Barnet designed it with ecclesiastical detailing that would make a cathedral jealous -- cherubs, angels, gargoyles, all carved from Pyrmont sandstone. It is the only surviving example of Victorian railway funerary architecture in Australia. Barnet clearly believed that if you were going to run a train service for corpses, you should do it with style.

Here is the protocol that gets you. As the funeral train approached each station along the route, the driver would toll his bell and slow down. Men standing on the platform and railway employees would remove their hats and bow their heads until the train passed. Every single trip. Twice a day. For sixty years. An entire city doffing its hats to the dead.

The receiving station at the other end -- the one at Rookwood Cemetery -- no longer exists in its original location. In the nineteen-fifties, it was dismantled brick by brick and rebuilt as All Saints Church in Ainslie, Canberra. A train station for the dead was literally resurrected as a church. You could not make that up.

This building now sits somewhat incongruously on Regent Street in Chippendale, surrounded by university buildings and cafes. Most people walk past without a second glance. Now you know what it is.