A MAJOR new small-screen series about the people who built the Settle-Carlisle railway is about to go into production - but ITV drama bosses admitted none of the scenes will be filmed where the line actually runs.

Jericho, featuring some of TV's top actors, is set in the north-western Yorkshire Dales in the 1870s and tells the story of the Wild West-style life of the railway navvies and their families as they built one of Britain's most scenic rail routes.

But the nearest the film crews and actors will get to the railway is the opposite side of the Dales.

Most of the filming, which begins tomorrow (Friday) and will last until October, will be done in the Colne valley, Bolton Abbey, Worsley near Sheffield and around Huddersfield.

The epic drama, which is expected to be sold globally, features Call The Midwife star Jessica Raine, Yorkshire-born Full Monty actor Mark Addy and Clarke Peters, of The Wire,

The eight-part series takes takes its title from one of the overcrowded ramshackle settlements that housed workers on the Ribblehead section.

Jericho consisted of two lines of huts, roaming pigs and a pub in a rock-roofed hole, and was overlooked by Whernside and Ingleborough, the two highest peaks in the Yorkshire Dales.

Scores of navvies were said to have been killed there in work accidents or died during smallpox outbreaks.

Historian Dick Sullivan said law and order was difficult to maintain in the area, where there were few policemen, who were 'tolerated, but despised'.

He wrote: "The engineer said things were looking up in Jericho: there hadn't been a fight for a fortnight, whereas one Sunday in summer he'd counted seven brawls going on all at the same time."

One of the drama's central characters will be Annie Quaintain, who moves to Jericho with her children following her husband’s death to open a boarding house for the labourers.

The series is written by Sherlock and Dr Who writer Steve Thompson.

An ITV spokesman said: "Rough, rustic and remote, yet with a wild west, carnival atmosphere, Jericho is a community of pioneers, settlers and outcasts, people with secrets to hide and those looking to start again.

"The terrain is hostile and if the land doesn’t break the colourful community of men and women - navvies, entrepreneurs, street urchins, prostitutes, families, wives, girlfriends and lovers - it will take seven years to complete."