With spade, pickaxe, cart, crowbar, and sweat, the navvies built over 17,000 kilometres of railway in Sweden. No other profession had such difficult working conditions and such heavy work. But the pay was better than for other labourers: a whole 25 öre an hour. (That's roughly equivalent to fourteen Swedish kronor in today's currency.)

The navvies were divided into teams with different tasks. There were earth excavators, stone breakers, rock blasters, and track layers.

The track layers were the elite among the navvies. When the track foundation was finished, it was they who carried the sleepers and rails. Each rail weighed 400 kg and was carried by five men. Their task was then to spike, wedge, splice, and adjust the track. Normally, a team of sixteen men could lay half a kilometer of track per day.

In addition to hand tools, gunpowder was the navvies’ only aid. But the explosive force of gunpowder is rather poor.

During the 1860s, there were experiments with using the much more efficient nitroglycerin instead. The problem was that it easily detonated upon impact. Accidents were many. It wasn't until Alfred Nobel introduced the much safer dynamite that the new explosive came into general use.