I've been learning this song for the last thirty years! some of the lines just wouldn't sink in for a long time. I performed it for the first time on Saturday last week to a not-particularly-folkie audience in my home village, and you could have heard a pin drop! I've been on a cloud ever since - I wish it was always as good ...

I heard that Lightfoot wrote the song for a competition CPR held to celebrate its centenary; the winner was "Canadian Pacific" (carry me ten thousand miles - you know the one) by John Denver(?). I suppose they wanted a song about the railroad, not the men who built it.

Steve