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I’ve always worked very hard – outdoors for most of my life as a railway platelayer – and I think that’s made me endure as long as I have.

As the war progressed women took on the better paid but more hazardous posts of track maintenance platelayer, shunter and guard.

It lasted half the night, and then each clay-stained navvy and tattooed platelayer slept and snored where he fell.

They exert themselves to the utmost, and have no assistance in the way of practical gangers and platelayers, and have neither tools nor conveniences of any kind.

One of them explicitly declared his envy of a platelayer whom the train passed on the line.