ABSTRACT
In the ninety years preceding the outbreak of the First World War, the construction of over 23,000 'route' miles of line provided work for the navvy in railway building somewhere in the United Kingdom. The British decennial census of population commenced in 1801 and the first to coincide with a time of railway building was that of June 1841. As for the Irish, the nationality that is sometimes given the credit for having built the entire system, they were at work on railways throughout England even before the great outflow from Ireland which followed the famine of the 1840s. The majority of the work in railway building, such as excavating cuttings and making embankments, could be carried out by a reasonably fit labourer after only a little training. But any corps of railwaymen also contained workers with a wide variety of skills.
