What is it about train songs? Why are there so many of them, where do they come from, and why do we love 'em so much?
I'll speak for myself: I love train songs; I always have. Trains run through all of the musical genres I've been the most obsessed with my listening life: the blues, for starters, in which you can always hear a train- trains that take lovers away, or more to the point, leave them behind; gospel music, in which the trains depart from this world and deliver you home (but make sure you're on the right car, 'cause they run both ways).
Country, soul, and rock'n'roll are steaming with trains-- their relentless motion, locomotive power, and percussive rhythms (Elvis Presley's rhythm section at Sun Records might as well have been a train). Folk music is populated with railroaders, from the men who hammered the spikes (John Henry) to the engineers who drove them (Casey Jones), to the thundering beasts themselves (The Wabash Cannonball). You can't listen to any music created by country folks without getting some train soot on you, or without the cutlery rattling in your kitchen drawers.
And that's just it; trains are physical, tangible, right there, every day. You can touch them, smell them. You hear them in the night, and by day you can see them coming from miles away. They're gigantic, dramatic, they shake the landscape. Trains are close to the people, and especially so in the years when the folk music idioms were being laid (like the tracks themselves). Trains created the countries that created the music which celebrates them; there wouldn't be any Canada without trains, and there sure wouldn't be any Woody Guthrie. Trains made nations possible, and migrations too.
Trains were a cheap mode of travel; they meant escape, and return, or new starts in faraway cities; trains carried hobos, migrant workers; they took soldiers to war and brought them home, one way or another. It's trains take you to heaven, not airplanes or buses; because trains made all things possible, took and gave back all things. Here's four of my favourite train songs:
Down There By The Train (Tom Waits), sung by Johnny Cash.
This song's got it all-- the hobo dream of a magic place where 'the train goes slow'; the train ride that'll redeem all sins, and which- 'if you're there on time'- is available to us all, and the mythology of america itself: ('I saw Judas Iscariot carryin' John Wilkes Booth/ they were down there by the train...').
It takes a writer like Tom Waits, someone who's ingested and transmitted America like he has, to write 'Down There By The Train'. It's a perfect case, a perfect song. And here it is sung by Johnny Cash (whom Waits never met, and whom he didn't even know had recorded the song until American Recordings was ready to come out). Johnny Cash wrote and sang some of the most popular train songs we know ('Folsom Prison', 'Orange Blossom Special'), and he's a man whose voice means America as much as the song he's singing here. Man, am I ever glad this recording happened. In my opinion, this is one of the top folk music team-ups to ever occur. You be the judge.
Texas 1947, by Guy Clark.
This is one of my favourites, and in my opinion, they don't get 
better. 'Texas 1947' captures the sheer, childlike wonder for trains-- what kid doesn't love something that weighs hundreds of thousands of pounds, is made of riveted iron, and thunders by so close it sucks your breath away? I never heard of a kid getting a nickel 'smashed flatter than a dime' by a passing bus. Airplanes can fly, but even so they haven't captured the imaginations of songwriters the way trains have. 'Trains are big and black and smokin', says Guy Clark, and that about sums it up. Something else this song conveys is the time when trains ruled the landscape-- the power of place they had in the day-to-day lives of rural communities. The only YouTube link I could find for it also includes Clark's 'Let It Roll', but the first 3 minutes are all 'Texas 1947'. Please, close your eyes and don't be distracted by the weird shit the uploader-of-the-song chose to put on the screen. Oh, and incidentally, Johnny Cash cut this one too (the brass ring for a train song), but I prefer Guy Clark's version. He puts you right there on the hood of one of those cars parked at the train depot. See for yourself.
3:10 to Yuma (Ned Washington/George Duning), sung by Frankie Laine.
The hollywood duster 3:10 to Yuma hit matinee screens in 1957, when westerns ruled the flickering dark. A lot of kids my dad's age would've dreamed of being Glenn Ford (playing the heavy for once) or Van Heflin (as the ordinary fella turned hero). Fifty years later it's Russell Crowe and Christian Bale as the 
captured outlaw Ben Wade and the rancher, Dan Evans- whose family's hard-up enough he offers to personally transport Wade -for $200- to the train in Contention, Arizona (the 3:10) that'll take Wade to Yuma Prison. Both the original and the remake are excellent films, but the 2007 version is missing something vital: the song. There's no song!!!
In the fifties, a western without a theme song would be like a songless James Bond movie today. Unheard of. '3:10 to Yuma' is one of the best themes Hollywood ever produced (next to High Noon, that song title being the arrival time of the train. I never thought of it before, but two of my favourite western songs hinge on train schedules- one'll take a man to prison at 3:10, the other's bringing a just-released killer back for revenge on the noon train- the heroes in both cases racing against the clock. Cool. Incidentally, Ned Washington also supplied the lyric to 'High Noon', which won the Oscar for best song in 1952). Frankie Laine sang '3:10 to Yuma', another reason it's an ethereal triumph, but beware: the link I've provided is the theme which plays over the opening credits of the original film, not the bastardized-for-popular-radio version Laine recorded as a follow up, in which the coolest lyrics of the song were sugared down into meaningless love sap. Unfortunately for us all, Frankie Laine did the same thing to 'High Noon' (sung in the original movie by country singer Tex Ritter- John Ritter's father, by the way). Yes, I am a song nerd. Anyway, the link I've provided is the real deal, and it's a ghostly treat. Accept no substitutes.
The Steam That Turns The Wheel (Raghu Lokanathan), performed by Raghu Lokanathan.
The Steam That Turns The Wheel (Raghu Lokanathan)
once there was a railway engineer
he was the man who kept the trains running
on a three-day northern run
well I bet he never heard of Casey Jones
but I bet he would've felt the tale
of the fateful trip to Santa Fe
and once he told me how much weight of coal
you've got to shovel for every mile
to make the steam that turns the wheel
to make the steam that turns the wheel
to make the steam that turns the wheel upon the track
when the dusty desert plain was roaring by
he wore a scarf over his mouth
making away like Jesse James
and he marvelled at the shades of green
in the hilly country where they grew the tea
and wondered what life was like for the pickers
who watched the locomotive pass
sometimes a child among them there would ask
what makes the steam that turns the wheel?
what makes the steam that turns the wheel?
what makes the steam that turns the wheel upon the track?
he hauled poor folks huddled on the roof
rich folks sprawled out in the berths
and foreign grain to flatter hunger
it was enemy soldiers, once, from border wars
some hadn't eaten for many days
he saw there men his age or younger
and if war's a train then where within the hearts
of men and women is the coal
that makes the steam that turns the wheel
that makes the steam that turns the wheel
that makes the steam that turns the wheel
that makes the steam that turns the wheel
that makes the steam that turns the wheel
that makes the steam that turns the wheel
that makes the steam that turns the wheel
that makes the steam that turns the wheel
that makes the steam that turns the wheel
that makes the steam that turns the wheel
that makes the steam that turns the wheel upon the track?
There are a lot of train songs which might have been included here which aren't: Children's songs! Bank robber songs! Songs of workin' on the railroad! Ghost songs. Oh, I know. The most conspicuously missing are the hobo songs, which I would argue are half the mythology of train songs altogether. If you've read this far I have no doubt that at least five song titles have sprung to your mind. I know!!
I'd like to leave you with one last recommendation, only because it's a hobo song that couldn't have been written anywhere but Canada. It's called 'Freezin' To Death In A Boxcar'. It's by a Winnipeg songwriter named Rob Vaarmeyer, and it's performed here by Andrew Neville and The Poor Choices. 
'Freezin' To Death In A Boxcar'... the title's a movie, all by itself. It lets you know what you're in for. It's the story of another man hypnotized by the trains, and although you know before even pressing play how that works out for him, the beauty of his tale is that there's no self-pity in it. 'It's the life that I chose and it won't surprise you to know/ that I'm freezin' to death in a boxcar'. Also, you wouldn't know it from this version necessarily, but it's a great singalong! In any case, it's a song that wouldn't have been written in Texas. It's a contemporary Canadian folk song, and it belongs to the great thundering canon of train songs everywhere.
We could make a whole other list of songs about buses, cars, and airplanes, but, as Gordon Lightfoot put it, 'you can't hop a jet plane/ like you can a freight train/ so I best be on my way/ in the early morning rain'.
