Pick, shovel, dynamite: the classic account of the men who built the railways.

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.

"Absorbing detail presented so readably that no one with a spark of imagination and a twinge of interest in people could fail to find this book a pleasure" - Evening Standard

"A brilliant book about a magnificent and vanished race of men" - Listerner

"Coleman's vivid and perceptive study of Victorian railway navvies is something of a landmark" - Guardian

"Coleman's pioneering work of industrial history is handsomely illustrated with prints and photographs from the time with a new introduction from the most distinguished recent historian of the railways" - The National (Glasgow)