, J. O. Halliwell-Phillipps, 1878
or pdf, page 21, original p. xv
In the USA, the sound of honky-tonk, boogie-woogie, train, and harmonica
blues, gospel, bluegrass, and country music were all influenced by the rhythm of the railroad, the
'lwonesome' sound of the steam-whistle, the clickety-clack of the steam train - a very different kind of nostalgia from that found in the poems of John Betjeman, or in UK skiffle music. But British smokestacks made it happen! That’s my theory. I've
written two train songs in my time, "The Stourbridge Lion" and
"The Kenyan Cannonball".
Three cheers for Foster, Rastrick and Co who built the Stourbridge Lion, the Delaware and Hudson!
Horatio Allen came over to England in 1828 and signed a contract for four locomotives, which were delivered in New York in 1829.
About The Stourbridge Lion
"Much has been written about this locomotive, largely because of its claim to fame - that it was the first steam locomotive to run on a commercial line in the United States. Built by Foster, Rastrick and Co. in 1829, the Stourbridge Lion's historic first run took place on August 8th of that year." See
Things were never to be the same once the locomotive,
The Stourbridge Lion, arrived in the
USA, although it was heavy for the American tracks, and apparently wasn't used as often as I'd imagined.
The test trial of the British-built Lion down a US railroad line took place on August 8, 1829.
My own effort at a humorous railway country song, written in Kenya in the 1970s:
The Kenyan Cannonball
I've heard of all your Cannonballs
rattling down the line;
they're always heading southwards,
they all pull in on time.
The wheels keep on a-turning
and the smokestacks always shine -
but if you want to see God's country
then try this train of mine.
CHORUS
The Kenyan Cannonball, the Kenyan Cannonball,
The steam comes from the chimney, oh hear the whistle call.
It chugs across the sleepers, it seems ten miles a day,
If you want to get there faster, you can push or you can
pray.
Some folks talk of walking down that lonesome railroad
track,
they're forever counting cross-ties, with a sack upon their
back.
I'm not saying that they romanticise
the freight-train or hobo-
but they're not the only ones
who've heard steam whistles blow.
CHORUS
The trains all start rolling from the East towards the West,
And way out here in Kenya, they still think steam's the
best.
They send goods to Uganda, and back towards the Coast,
And though I've never hopped a freight, I'm quite prepared
to boast:
From the wide old Indian Ocean across to that great Lake,
Over rivers and Rift Valley
runs the Iron Snake.
Yes, the mean man-eating lions once made an awful mess,
But none of them could speed it up, the lunatic express.
CHORUS
From Mombasa to
Kisumu, and to Kampala too,
You can pay or ride the box-car, you can yodel till you're
blue.
You can use the rails for bracelets, you can twist them
round your arm,
But if you want to get there quicker, ride a tractor
from your farm
CHORUS
List of train songs
1923 - Henry Whitter - "Wreck of the Old 97"
Long Steel Rail, The Railroad in American Folksong, Norm Cohen
Some more English poems
On The Projected
Kendal And Windermere Railway
Is then no nook of English ground secure
From rash assault? Schemes of retirement sown
In youth, and 'mid the busy world kept pure
As when their earliest flowers of hope were blown,
Must perish; how can they this blight endure?
And must he too the ruthless change bemoan
Who scorns a false utilitarian lure
'Mid his paternal fields at random thrown?
Baffle the threat, bright Scene, from Orresthead
Given to the pausing traveler's rapturous glance:
Plead for thy peace, thou beautiful romance
Of nature; and, if human hearts be dead,
Speak, passing winds; ye torrents, with your strong
And constant voice, protest against the wrong.
William Wordsworth (1844)
From
On the Departure
Platform
We kissed at the barrier; and
passing through
She left me, and moment by moment got
Smaller and smaller, until to my view
She was but a spot;
A wee white spot of muslin fluff
That down the diminishing platform bore
Through hustling crowds of gentle and rough
To the carriage door.
Under the lamplight's fitful glowers,
Behind dark groups from far and near,
Whose interests were apart from ours
She
would disappear...
Thomas Hardy (
Time's Laughingstocks and Other Verses, 1909)
This is the Night Mail, W. H. Auden (from the film)
The Express
After the first powerful, plain manifesto
The black statement of pistons, without more fuss
But gliding like a queen, she leaves the station.
Without bowing and with restrained unconcern
She passes the houses which humbly crowd outside,
The gasworks, and at last the heavy page
Of death, printed by gravestones in the cemetery.
Beyond the town, there lies the open country
Where, gathering speed, she acquires mystery,
The luminous self-possession of ships on ocean.
It is now she begins to sing - at first quite low
Then loud, and at last with a jazzy madness -
The song of her whistle screaming at curves,
Of deafening tunnels, brakes, innumerable bolts.
And always light, aerial, underneath,
Retreats the elate metre of her wheels.
Streaming through metal landscapes on her lines,
She plunges new eras of white happiness,
Where speed throws up strange shapes, broad curves
And parallels clean like trajectories from guns.
At last, further than Edinburgh or Rome,
Beyond the crest of the world, she reaches night
Where only a low stream-line brightness
Of phosphorus on the tossing hills is light.
Ah, like a comet through flame, she moves entranced,
Wrapt in her music no bird song, no, nor bough
Breaking with honey buds, shall ever equal.
Stephen Spender
Attend the long express from Waterloo
That takes us down to Cornwall.
Tea-time shows
The small fields waiting, every blackthorn hedge
Straining inland before the south-west gale.
The emptying train, wind in the ventilators,
Puffs out of Egloskerry to Tresmeer
Through minty meadows, under bearded trees
And hills upon whose sides the clinging farms
Hold Bible Christians. Can it really be
That this same carriage came from Waterloo?
On Wadebridge station what a breath of sea
Scented the Camel valley! Cornish air,
Soft Cornish rains, and silence after steam......
As out of Derry's stable came the brake
To drag us up those long, familiar hills,
Past haunted woods, and oil lit farms and on
To far Trebetherick by the sounding sea.
John Betjeman
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