What is "navvies"

Usage examples of "navvies".

Several raised their blasters, but none fired, some of the navvies taking refuge behind the pod of Firebirds, the smokestack of the engine or the big .

Releasing the chains holding the Hummers in place, the sec man started the war wags, while the navvies tossed in bags of ammo, grens and the small portable Firebirds.

Crates lined up on the quayside at Jaffa, chap ticking them off in a book, navvies handling them barefoot in soiled dungarees.

He cursed the wit of the three navvies for drawing attention to themselves.

The navvies, as his sec men liked to be called, were heavily tattooed, displaying their ranks on their faces, and dressed in a similar way, making them easy to spot among the others in the wags.

The navvies who used picks were paid nineteen shillings, the shovelers seventeen.

They sent hundreds of navvies out from England to build us a railway .

British navvies have built railways all over Europe and America, Africa, Russia, and no doubt will go to India and China as well, and South America too.

They had ridden together on bright spring days like this, up hills in all kinds of country, towards rail tracks half finished where hundreds of navvies worked.

And navvies knew how to set up rails on pontoons, if necessary, which could cross marshland, shifting streams, subsidence, anything you cared to think of.

Except that if a rabbit could dig through the hillside and build tunnels using nothing but its feet, then an army of navvies with explosives would have little trouble digging a tunnel for a train.

I have heard, the railway navvies are too skilled to use inadequate materials of any kind.

Monk glanced around the walls at a number of very striking paintings and etchings, several of them of dramatic railway works, towering cliffs on either side of gorges carved by swarming teams of navvies, tiny figures against the grandeur of the scenery.

Rathbone recalled the foreman of the team of navvies who had worked on the Derby line, and drew from him greater and more tedious detail of the cutting and blasting necessary to drive a track through a hillside, coupled with the labor and cost of building a viaduct.