Goodman penned CONY likely in early 1970, when plans were announced to end independent passenger rail service in the U.S. Who else but an unreconstructed Chicagoan could have written such wonderful songs as "A Dying Cub Fan's Last Request" or "Lincoln Park Pirates' or "Daley's Gone, One More Round" - or "The City of New Orleans"? So it is no surprise to me at all that the best damn train song ever written was brought into being by a Chicagoan, and that is what Steve Goodman was, dyed in the wool and to the marrow of his bones. ![]() It was also Steve Goodman's birthplace in 1948 (2 years before me), and you just couldn't live in the Second City in the '50s without your life defined by trains of all sorts, from freight and long-haul passenger trains to the electric inter-urbans to the subways to the commuter trains to the legendary El (for those non-Chicagoans, the elevated electric commuter trains whose track configuration created the Loop, which is downtown Chicago.) Trains were in our DNA as surely as autos were for '50s and '60s teens in LA. ![]() ![]() Who of us did not have a model train set, likely with an engine that recreated one of those fabled trains?Īnd for nearly a hundred years, the very center of rail service in the U.S. That's why every one of us learned about the driving of the Golden Spike at Promontory Point, Utah, in 1869 completing the transcontinental railroad, an epic achievement that marked the first time in human history that a fast, reliable, and safe means of transport breached a continental expanse and linked the two largest oceans in the world.įreight was always at the core of the railroad business, but the great rail companies of the day took such pride in the quality of their passenger service that they dared to name their trains in much the same way as ocean liners were named - and those names conjured up the romance of far places in the minds of American children for more than a century. And go they did, by the millions, especially at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries. The railroads did not simply connect places where people were they led the way to places for people to go. It was the train that superseded the barge and the paddle-wheel steamer as the primary vehicle of American commerce because the latter were limited to where there were navigable waterways but the former could and did go anywhere and everywhere. It may have been the automobile industry that turned America from a middling power to the industrial giant of the world through most of the 20th century - but that would never have happened had there not first been what we today call an infrastructure of steel rails that made large scale - gigantic scale, really, - manufacturing in this country possible, even inevitable. and the plethora of great songs engendered by it, songs like "The Wreck of Old 97" and its nephew "Charlie on the MTA," and like "The Ballad of Casey Jones," and "Pat Works on the Railway" and "Drill Ye Tarriers" and "John Henry" and "The Wabash Cannonball" and "Freight Train" and scores, even hundreds more. Whoever originated it, he was making a sweepingly significant statement, given the centrality of the train to the history of the U.S. ![]() It is "the best damn train song ever written," according to (depending on your source) Johnny Cash, Kris Kristofferson (who discovered it and composer Steve Goodman), or John Prine - or all three, though my money is on Goodman's close friend and collaborator Prine.
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