Book
Tunnel Tigers
First published 1986
Nick Wortley is drawn into the hazardous work of the men building a railway through the Pennines between Sheffield and Manchester. Surveying, blasting and tunnelling turn engineering ambition into physical danger, with navvies living and working in temporary communities under conditions where collapse, disease and accident are accepted costs of progress.
Cordell places ordinary labourers beneath the celebrated names of the railway age, showing how monumental projects depended on thousands of workers whose lives rarely entered official histories. Competition among engineers and contractors matters, but the novel’s centre is the workforce cutting through rock by hand and explosive. The railway becomes both a symbol of early Victorian modernity and a reminder of the human price paid to connect industrial Britain.
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