Canadian Railroad Trilogy

From Freepedia

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, 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".

This song has been covered by John Mellencamp and George Hamilton IV, among others. James Keelaghan performed the song on the Lightfoot tribute album, Beautiful.