Terry Coleman 
Railway Navvies [EPUB ebook] 
A History of the Men who Made 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.