Canadian Railroad Trilogy

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"Canadian Railroad Trilogy"

Single by Gordon Lightfoot
from the album The Way I Feel
Released	1967
Recorded	1966 (rerecorded 1975)
Genre	Folk
Length	6:22 (rerecorded 7:04)
Label	United Artists
Writer(s)	Gordon Lightfoot

The "Canadian Railroad Trilogy" is a song by Gordon Lightfoot which describes the building of the Canadian Pacific Railway.

This song was commissioned by the CBC for a special broadcast on January 1, 1967. It appeared on Lightfoot's The Way I Feel album later in the same year. The structure of the song was patterned after Gibson & Camp's "Civil War Trilogy" (famously recorded by The Limeliters on the 1963 live album "Our Men In San Francisco"), with a slow tempo section in the middle and faster paced sections at the beginning and end. In the first section, the song picks up speed like a locomotive building up a head of steam.

While Lightfoot's song echoes the optimism of the railroad age, it also chronicles the cost in sweat and blood of building the "iron road runnin' from the sea to the sea".

Lightfoot re-recorded the track on his 1975 compilation album, Gord's Gold.

According to Lightfoot, Pierre Berton said to him, "You know, Gord, you said as much in that song as I said in my book." Berton was referring to his books, about the building of the railway across Canada, The National Dream and The Last Spike.

In 2001, Gordon Lightfoot's "Canadian Railroad Trilogy" was honoured as a MasterWorks by the Audio-Visual Preservation Trust of Canada.

The song has been covered by John Mellencamp and George Hamilton IV, among others. James Keelaghan performed the song on the Lightfoot tribute album, Beautiful. In the summer of 2004, the song was performed by that year's Canadian Idol Top 6.