A chance encounter leads young Jim Stringer, a railway porter, to move from Yorkshire to London, enticed by the prospect of becoming a railway man 'of the right sort'. But when he arrives in the Waterloo of 1903, it is to discover a world of garish pubs and tawdry brothels boxed in by towering, blank-faced factories - a world that judders perpetually to the din of the trains on the giant viaducts overhead. Jim finds that his duties are mysteriously confined to the strangest corner of the South Western's business: a railway line that runs to an enormous cemetery. Still more perplexingly, the men he works alongside have formed an instant loathing for him. And his predecessor has disappeared under suspicious circumstances. Can Jim work out what is going on before he too is travelling on a one-way coffin ticket aboard the Necropolis Railway?