Building the last Main Line Railway

Contractor's Builders Yards & Locomotives: gcrcs83

Looking across a line of contractor's temporary railway towards a navvy camp near Flecknoe, Warwickshire, circa 1897. Note the Griff coal wagon from Nuneaton full of coal for use primarily on the steam locomotives, shovels and cranes although a little would be used within the camp.

However bleak and simplistic these huts appear today, this accommodation built by the contractors was a huge improvement on the primitive and inadequate dwellings which the navvies had inhabited for much of the nineteenth century. Workers living here would have worked for T. Oliver & Son, the firm responsible for building this section of the Last Main Line (Contract No.4, Rugby to Woodford).

back