TV crews are set to descend on a national park to film a big budget drama series about the Wild West-style life there during the building of one of the UK's most scenic railways.

Jericho, which will star Call The Midwife actor Jessica Raine, York-born Full Monty actor Mark Addy and Clarke Peters, of The Wire, will be set in the north-western Yorkshire Dales in the 1870s, when the construction of the Settle to Carlisle Railway saw an army of workers living there in shanty towns.

The backdrop to the eight-part series, by Sherlock and Dr Who writer Steve Thompson, will be a viaduct, similar to the 402-metre long one at Ribblehead, near Hawes, for which 1.5 million bricks were laid.

The epic drama by ITV, which is also shooting Beowulf in the North-East, 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 overlooked Whernside and Ingleborough, the two highest peaks in the Yorkshire Dales.

It is thought a large number of the navvies, who also built the 2.4km Blea Moor tunnel 500ft below the moor and were reported to eat about 18 pounds of beef a week, were killed there in work accidents, while scores of others 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 series' 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.

Filming, which will also take place in Sheffield and Huddersfield, is due to begin later this month and will continue until October.

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."

Tourism bosses said they hoped the drama, which ITV Studios Global Entertainment will distribute internationally, would help sustain the surge of visitors to the area, following last year's Tour de France.