This is the definitive story of the men who built the railways--the unknown Victorian laborers who blasted, tunneled, drank, and brawled their way across 19th-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.