Every day thousands of people hurry through Sydney’s Central Station.

They run for trains, buy coffee, stare at departure boards and complain about delays. Few probably stop to consider what occupied this enormous piece of Sydney before the platforms, clock tower and railway lines arrived.

It was a cemetery.

Not a tiny churchyard containing a handful of graves, but Sydney’s principal nineteenth-century burial ground, containing tens of thousands of bodies.

And immediately beside it survives one of Sydney’s most extraordinary Victorian buildings: a railway station constructed specifically for the transportation of the dead.

Together, the Devonshire Street Cemetery and Mortuary Station tell a remarkable story about how Sydney dealt with death as the colonial settlement grew into a city.

Sydney Runs Out of Room for Its Dead

Sydney had already experienced this problem once.

Its principal burial ground from 1792 was located where Sydney Town Hall now stands.

As the settlement expanded, however, having a cemetery in what was becoming the centre of town became increasingly undesirable.

By 1820 it was full.

A new burial ground was therefore established farther away from the populated centre, on sandy ground near Devonshire Street.

It was consecrated in January 1820 and became known variously as the New Sydney Burial Ground, Sandhills Cemetery and Devonshire Street Cemetery.

At the time, its position made perfect sense.

It was outside the main town.

Sydney, however, had an inconvenient habit of growing.

A City of the Dead

Devonshire Street Cemetery was not really one cemetery.

It was a collection of denominational burial grounds.

Different sections were allocated to Anglicans, Roman Catholics, Presbyterians, Wesleyans, Congregationalists, Quakers and Jews.

Death, like much of colonial society, was religiously segregated.

The cemetery rapidly filled.

Sydney’s population was growing and, in an age before antibiotics, modern sanitation and effective treatments for many infectious diseases, death was an everyday presence.

By the middle decades of the nineteenth century overcrowding had become a serious problem.

Eventually the cemetery was formally closed to new burials in 1867, although burials in existing family graves and vaults could sometimes continue.

Meanwhile Sydney continued advancing towards it.

The isolated burial ground was no longer isolated.

Houses, businesses, roads and railway infrastructure surrounded it.

By the end of the nineteenth century the cemetery had deteriorated badly. Vegetation had become overgrown, rubbish was dumped around it and graves were crowded into virtually every available piece of land — even beneath pathways.

Sydney once again had a cemetery occupying land that an expanding city desperately wanted for something else.

This time it wanted a railway station.

Central Station Claims the Cemetery

Sydney already possessed a railway terminus, but by the late nineteenth century the existing facilities were inadequate for the rapidly expanding suburban and country railway network.

The government wanted a much larger central terminal.

Unfortunately for the dead of Devonshire Street, their cemetery occupied precisely the land required.

In January 1901 the NSW Government announced that the cemetery would be resumed.

Relatives were given a short period in which to arrange the removal and reburial of family members.

Then began one of the largest exercises in exhumation Sydney had ever witnessed.

It has been estimated that more than 30,000 bodies were buried within the cemetery.

Graves were opened.

Coffins and remains were recovered where possible.

Headstones were removed.

Families who could be identified or contacted could arrange for relatives to be transferred elsewhere.

Many remains were reinterred at other cemeteries, while unclaimed remains were transferred to Bunnerong Cemetery, associated with what later became the Botany cemetery complex.

The operation was enormous — and inevitably imperfect.

After eighty years of burial, many graves were poorly marked. Records could be incomplete. Coffins had deteriorated and some remains could no longer be readily identified.

So although the cemetery was officially cleared, the popular description of Central Station as being built “over a cemetery” is not entirely fanciful.

Archaeologically, the site retains the potential for evidence of its former use.

Central is not simply standing where a cemetery once existed.

The cemetery forms part of the history buried beneath the railway itself.

Central Opens

Clearing was substantially completed by 1902 and construction of the new terminal proceeded.

The present Central Station opened in 1906.

The transformation must have been extraordinary.

Within only a few years, a sprawling Victorian cemetery had disappeared beneath one of the busiest transport complexes in Australia.

Where mourners once walked between graves, passengers now hurried towards trains.

But strangely enough, the railway had already become intimately connected with Sydney’s dead decades before Central swallowed the cemetery.

For that story we need only travel a short distance along Regent Street.

There stands Mortuary Station.

When Sydney’s Dead Travelled by Train

By the 1840s it was obvious that Devonshire Street Cemetery could not continue indefinitely.

Sydney required an enormous new burial ground well beyond the increasingly crowded city.

Land was eventually selected at Haslem’s Creek, west of Sydney.

It became the great Rookwood Necropolis.

There was, however, a logistical problem.

Rookwood was a considerable distance from central Sydney.

Transporting a coffin, undertakers, clergy and an entire funeral party there by horse-drawn vehicles was expensive and difficult.

Fortunately, nineteenth-century Sydney possessed a relatively new piece of technology ideally suited to moving large numbers of people over long distances.

The railway.

Sydney therefore developed something that sounds extraordinary today:

funeral trains.

Mortuary Station

The building now known as Mortuary Station was designed by NSW Colonial Architect James Barnet, one of the most important architects of colonial Sydney.

Constructed in 1868–69 and opened in 1869, it was deliberately designed to look unlike an ordinary railway station.

It is an extraordinary piece of Gothic Revival architecture.

Sandstone arches, carved decoration, columns and an octagonal portico gave the building something of the atmosphere of a church.

That was intentional.

Victorian funerals were elaborate social and religious rituals.

The railway journey was not merely transportation.

It became part of the funeral itself.

A coffin could be brought to Mortuary Station accompanied by family and mourners.

From there the funeral train travelled west towards Rookwood.

The dead and the living travelled together.

The Railway into Rookwood

The railway did not simply stop outside the cemetery.

Tracks actually entered the necropolis.

Special stations were constructed within Rookwood so that coffins and mourners could disembark near the appropriate burial sections.

Eventually there were several mortuary stations within the enormous cemetery.

James Barnet also designed a receiving station at Rookwood corresponding with the Sydney terminus.

Thus Sydney developed an extraordinary Victorian transportation system devoted to death:

city → Mortuary Station → funeral train → Rookwood → cemetery station → grave.

It was public transport for the final journey.

Even Coffins Had Tickets

Funeral railways reflected the intensely organised nature of Victorian death.

Special railway hearses could carry coffins, while passenger carriages carried mourners.

Services and arrangements varied over time, but the railway made large funerals at distant Rookwood considerably more practical.

There is something characteristically Victorian about the entire arrangement.

The industrial revolution had produced railways capable of transporting commuters, livestock, mail and merchandise.

Inevitably somebody realised they could transport funerals as well.

Yet it was not simply bureaucratic efficiency.

Mortuary Station’s elaborate architecture demonstrates that considerable thought was given to dignity and ritual.

The railway might have been modern industrial technology, but death was still surrounded by ceremony.

The Decline of the Funeral Train

During the twentieth century motor vehicles gradually transformed funeral practices.

Motor hearses could travel directly from a church, home or funeral parlour to a cemetery without requiring transfers between different forms of transport.

The specialised railway funeral became increasingly unnecessary.

Mortuary Station ceased performing its original role as funeral transport declined.

The dedicated funeral railway eventually disappeared, with the cemetery branch closing in 1948.

Most of the associated railway infrastructure vanished.

Mortuary Station survived.

Remarkably, so did its architectural counterpart at Rookwood — although not where it originally stood.

The former Rookwood receiving station was dismantled and eventually reconstructed in Canberra, where it became part of All Saints Church at Ainslie.

A railway station for the dead had become a church.

Sydney Builds Over Its Dead

There is an intriguing pattern here.

Central Station is not the only major Sydney landmark occupying a former cemetery.

Sydney Town Hall itself stands over the city’s earlier burial ground.

When that cemetery was cleared, some remains were transferred to Devonshire Street.

Then Devonshire Street Cemetery was itself cleared for Central.

Sydney’s dead had effectively been moved twice as the living city pursued them.

Town Hall displaced a cemetery.

Central displaced its successor.

Rookwood finally provided the vast permanent necropolis that an expanding metropolis required.

It is an extraordinary illustration of urban growth.

Cemeteries are established on the outskirts of cities because land is available and the dead can be separated from the living.

Then the city expands.

The outskirts become suburbs.

Land becomes valuable.

Eventually the dead find themselves occupying prime real estate.

Ghosts Beneath the Platforms?

Stories inevitably circulate about human remains still lying beneath Central Station.

Considering the enormous number of burials once occupying the site, it would be surprising if the clearance operation had recovered absolutely everything.

Nineteenth-century cemetery records were imperfect, graves deteriorated and some burials had occurred in extraordinarily crowded conditions.

But the popular image of Central simply being constructed directly over 30,000 untouched graves is misleading.

There was a deliberate and enormous exhumation program before construction began.

Most identifiable remains were removed.

What survives beneath Central is therefore less a secret intact cemetery than an archaeological landscape profoundly disturbed by both exhumation and railway construction.

And perhaps that reality is more interesting than the ghost stories.

A Station for the Living, a Station for the Dead

Central and Mortuary Station make an extraordinary historical pair.

One became Sydney’s great railway gateway.

The other was built specifically for passengers making a journey from which they would never return.

One represents the growth of the living city.

The other represents the elaborate culture of Victorian death.

Yet both grew from the same problem.

Sydney was expanding.

The cemetery at Devonshire Street could no longer cope.

A new necropolis was established at Rookwood.

The railway provided the means of reaching it.

And eventually the railway itself consumed the old cemetery.

Today millions of journeys begin and end at Central Station.

Almost nobody rushing for Platform 16 is thinking about the thousands of Sydneysiders who once lay buried beneath the surrounding railway complex.

But a short distance away, the sandstone arches of Mortuary Station remain.

They are a wonderfully strange monument to an era when Sydney’s railways did not merely carry people through their daily lives.

They carried them to their graves.

A grisly fact from the Devonshire Street cemetery

Did the dead “rise” during heavy rain? Yes, it is historically true that during heavy rain, fluid, organic matter, and even coffins and bodies began protruding or seeping out of the ground at the Old Central Cemetery (officially known as the Devonshire Street Cemetery), which once stood where Sydney’s Central Station is today.

This gruesome phenomenon happened due to a combination of terrible geography, extreme overcrowding, and poor burial practices in 19th-century Sydney.

Why This Happened

Built on Shifting Sand: Consecrated in 1820, the cemetery was built on an area known as the “Sydney Sand Hills”. Because the ground was sandy, uneven, and highly prone to erosion, heavy rainstorms would easily wash away the top layers of soil.

Severe Overcrowding: Over its decades of use, the cemetery became completely packed with more than 30,000 bodies. It filled up so fast that people were buried in shallower and shallower graves.

The 20-Centimeter Graves: To maximize space, cemetery workers eventually threw a layer of topsoil over existing graves to bury more bodies on top. This meant some corpses were buried just 20 centimeters beneath the surface.

The “Oozing Black Goo”: City Health Officer Henry Graham famously noted that bodies were so close to the surface you could literally touch them with a walking stick. During periods of heavy rain, locals complained of an “oozing black goo” (decomposition fluid) seeping through the brick retaining walls and running down Elizabeth Street, accompanied by a horrific stench wafting through the city. Water saturation also caused coffins to shift, poke out of the mud, or breach the surface.

The Aftermath

Because it had become a public health hazard and what locals dubbed a “death nest,” the cemetery was closed to new burials in 1867.

In 1901, the NSW government resumed the land to build Central Railway Station. An enormous operation took place to exhume the remains of over 30,000 people and relocate them to other locations, primarily the purpose-built Bunnerong Cemetery at La Perouse and Rookwood Cemetery. However, the exhumations were not perfect—during modern expansions of Central Station and the Sydney Metro, archaeologists have occasionally unearthed remnants of vaults, coffins, and skeletal remains that were missed over a century ago.

If you are interested in the dark history of early Sydney, would you like to know more about famous peoplewho were buried there, or how families tracked down and claimed their ancestors’ remains during the 1901 move?

Tim Alderman ©️2026

Sources

City of Sydney Archives — Devonshire Street Cemetery.

State Library of New South Wales — Dead Central and Devonshire Street Cemetery Digital Site Study.

Heritage NSW — Sydney Terminal and Central Railway Stations Group.

Heritage NSW — Mortuary Railway Station and Site.

Heritage NSW — Rookwood Cemetery and Necropolis.

Transport for NSW — historical and heritage documentation for Central Station.