The change of job was nothing unusual.
Many people moved from working on the land to working with machinery, in factories etc, and the railways were an up and coming concept. A farm could only support so many people, so if there were lots of children some may well move on to different things. Plus, in the age of Industrial Revolution, many "children" wanted something different than the toiling on the land that they had seen their parents doing, and probably heard about their forebears doing!