This is a rare picture.

Not only is the group of people posing formally for a photograph but the people in the scene were rarely photographed.

They are the navvies who built the railways in the Victoria era.

There are plenty of pictures to be found of the chairmen of the railway companies, station masters, platform staff, engine drivers, signallers and other railway roles but very few of the men and women who dug the tunnels and laid the track which formed the expansion of the railway network.

The navvies are the focus of week three of my Future Learn course on the Working Lives of the Railway in Victorian times.

The navvies worked in difficult and dangerous conditions and life in the camps was hard. These large communities of workers were viewed with suspicion by many people who saw an influx of outsiders – have times really changed that much?

Newspaper reports of drunken violence didn’t help the image of the navvies either.

Many of the navvies were illiterate although missionaries visited the camps to teach them to read and write. This means there are few contemporary first-hand writings about their lives and what we do know comes from the writings of those who went to the camps or from parliamentary inquiries into working conditions.

But what does come across was the sense of community among these itinerant workers. Wives and children lived in the camps and some of the camps had schools, churches, hospitals and lending libraries.

The railways wouldn’t have expanded at the rate they did had it not been for the navvies. They transformed the rural landscape of Britain into the core of the transport network we know today.

It’s a shame their role is so little documented and this course helps to rectify that.

Next week, it’s all about the clerks and those who worked in railway offices.