Locomotion, Philip Bryant
Chatanooga Choo Choo, Mack Gordon
Travel, Edna St. Vincent Millay
Freight Train Blues, Bob Dylan
Departure Platform, Thomas Hardy
My Baby Thinks He’s a Train, Leroy Preston
I Like To See It Lap The Miles, Emily Dickinson
Passage to India, Walt Whitman
This Train Is Bound For Glory
Long Black Train, Josh Turner
Charlie, The Man Who Never Returned, Jacqueline Steiner and
…..Bess Lomax Hawes
The End of the Line, The Traveling Wilburys
* * *
Riding in a Railroad Train, Ogden Nash
From A Railway Carriage, Robert Louis Stevenson
Night Mail, W.H. Auden
Crossing Brooklyn Ferry, Walt Whitman
Sit Down, You’re Rock’n the Boat
A Local Train of Thought, Siegfried Sasoon
Merry-Go-Round, Langston Hughes
Life’s Railway to Heaven
Freedom Train, Irvin Berlin
Folsom Prison Blues, Johnny Cash
Homeward Bound, Simon and Garfunkle
I’m Waiting at the Station, Susan Werner
Riding The “A” – May Swenson
One Train May Hide Another, Kenneth Koch
The Locomotive in Winter, Walt Whitman
Will The Lights Be White? Cy Warman
In the Station – Cream
Poetry Should Ride the Bus, Ruth Forman
Gate A-4, Naomi Shihab Nye
Locomotion
by Philip Bryant
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Chattanooga Choo Choo
by Mack Gordon
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Travel
By Edna St. Vincent Millay
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Freight Train Blues
by Bob Dylan
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Departure Platform
by Thomas Hardy
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,
Then show again, till I ceased to see
That flexible form, that nebulous white;
And she who was more than my life to me
Had vanished quite.
We have penned new plans since that fair fond day,
And in season she will appear again——
Perhaps in the same soft white array——
But never as then!
—— “And why, young man, must eternally fly
A joy you’ll repeat, if you love her well?”
——O friend, nought happens twice thus; why,
I cannot tell!
My Baby Thinks He’s A Train
By Leroy Preston
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I Like To See It Lap The Miles
by Emily Dickinson
I like to see it lap the Miles,
And lick the Valleys up,
And stop to feed itself at Tanks;
And then, prodigious, step
Around a Pile of Mountains,
And, supercilious, peer
In Shanties by the sides of Roads;
And then a Quarry pare
To fit its sides, and crawl between,
Complaining all the while
In horrid, hooting stanza;
Then chase itself down Hill
And neigh like Boanerges;
Then, punctual as a Star,
Stop–docile and omnipotent–
At its own stable door.
Passage to India (excerpts)
By Walt Whitman
Passage to India!
Lo, soul, for thee, of tableaus twain,
I see, in one, the Suez canal initiated, open’d,
I see the procession of steamships, the Empress Eugenie’s leading the van;
I mark, from on deck, the strange landscape, the pure sky, the level sand in the distance;
I pass swiftly the picturesque groups, the workmen gather’d,
The gigantic dredging machines.
In one, again, different, (yet thine, all thine, O soul, the same,)
I see over my own continent the Pacific Railroad, surmounting every barrier;
I see continual trains of cars winding along the Platte, carrying freight and passengers;
I hear the locomotives rushing and roaring, and the shrill steam-whistle,
I hear the echoes reverberate through the grandest scenery in the world;
I cross the Laramie plains—I note the rocks in grotesque shapes—the buttes;
I see the plentiful larkspur and wild onions—the barren, colorless, sage-deserts;
I see in glimpses afar, or towering immediately above me, the great mountains—I see the Wind River and the Wahsatch mountains;
I see the Monument mountain and the Eagle’s Nest—I pass the Promontory—I ascend the Nevadas;
I scan the noble Elk mountain, and wind around its base;
I see the Humboldt range—I thread the valley and cross the river,
I see the clear waters of Lake Tahoe—I see forests of majestic pines,
Or, crossing the great desert, the alkaline plains, I behold enchanting mirages of waters and meadows;
Marking through these, and after all, in duplicate slender lines,
Bridging the three or four thousand miles of land travel,
Tying the Eastern to the Western sea,
The road between Europe and Asia . . . .
Passage to India!
Lo, soul! seest thou not God’s purpose from the first?
The earth to be spann’d, connected by net-work,
The people to become brothers and sisters,
The races, neighbors, to marry and be given in marriage,
The oceans to be cross’d, the distant brought near,
The lands to be welded together.
A worship new, I sing;
You captains, voyagers, explorers, yours!
You engineers! you architects, machinists, yours!
You, not for trade or transportation only,
But in God’s name, and for thy sake, O soul . . . .
This Train Is Bound for Glory
(traditional)
This train is bound for glory, this train.
This train is bound for glory, this train.
This train is bound for glory,
Don’t carry nothing but the righteous and the holy.
This train is bound for glory, this train.
This train don’t carry no gamblers, this train;
This train don’t carry no gamblers, this train;
This train don’t carry no gamblers,
Liars, thieves, nor big shot ramblers,
This train is bound for glory, this train.
This train don’t carry no liars, this train;
This train don’t carry no liars, this train;
This train don’t carry no liars,
She’s streamlined and a midnight flyer,
This train don’t carry no liars, this train.
This train don’t carry no con men, this train;
This train don’t carry no con men, this train;
This train don’t carry no con men,
No wheeler dealers, here and gone men,
This train don’t carry no con men, this train.
This train don’t carry no rustlers, this train;
This train don’t carry no rustlers, this train;
This train don’t carry no rustlers,
Sidestreet walkers, two bit hustlers,
This train is bound for glory, this train.
The Long Black Train
by Josh Turner
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Charlie, The Man Who Never Returned
by Jacqueline Steiner and Bess Lomax Hawes
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End of the Line
by The Traveling Wilburys
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