Building the Railways

Thousands of navvies laboured building the lines and the most dangerous work was in constructing tunnels, such as Brunel’s Box tunnel on the Great Western Railway.

A visitor described the blasting,
“The match is applied, the explosion follows and a concussion such as you probably never felt before takes place; the solid rock appears to shake and the reverberation of the sound and shock is sensibly and fearfully experienced; another and another follow; and with a slight stretch of the imagination you may fancy yourself in the middle of a thunder cloud with heaven’s artillery booming around.”

What the visitor did not report was the danger faced by the thousand workers who laboured for two and a half years in the dark. During the work, the Bristol Infirmary reported “unusually high” figures for casualties, but was no more precise. On a later tunnel at Woodhead, on the Sheffield & Manchester Railway, the company surgeon reported dealing with 97 fractures and 140 other injuries, but when asked about fatalities, he merely replied that, as the dead had no need of his services, he had not kept notes.

There is no reason to suppose that Brunel shared the same callous attitude, but the loss of life at Box was still considerable, certainly more than a hundred. At times there is even a certain gallows humour in the situation. One unhappy man fell down one of the shafts and according to an eyewitness, his last words as he plummeted to his death were, “Oh dear!” Somehow it is hard to reconcile those words with any image of a railway navvy!