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...and today we're reading The Railway Navvies, by Terry Coleman. The blurb puts it quite eloquently:
>This is the definitive story of the men who built the railways – the unknown Victorian labourers who blasted, tunnelled, drank and brawled their way across nineteenth-century England. Preached at and plundered, sworn at and swindled, this anarchic elite endured perils and disasters, and carved out of the English countryside an industrial-age architecture unparalleled in grandeur and audacity since the building of the cathedrals.
...a history of the actual, literal building of the railway. You'd be surprised how long the work was carried out by sweat, muscle and, when that failed, dynamite; ironically, the Victorian contractors, who harried up scores of Scots and Irish and aimed them at an unsuspecting countryside, didn't want anything to do with that steam-powered nonsense until well after the Railway Mania period had come and gone. It's absorbing stuff, pick it up if you can.
