The north of Sweden in 1902. A team of railroad men are building a rail road from Luleå at the Bay of Bothnia to Narvik at the Norwegian Sea. One of the newest workers, Valfrid from the south of Sweden, is not accepted by neither Stora Ballong, the informal leader of the workers, nor the others. They refuse to talk to him but instead Valfrid gets help from the sworn enemy of the railroad workers: the greedy drugstore owner Blom.