To redeem this thread from the lower regions of Mudcat - a couple additions to keep things copasetic for the tie-splitting, line-straddlers..

The Hell Bound Train, Life's Railway to Heaven Long Steel Rail, Cohen, Norm, 1981 pp640-642

EXCERPTS:

A variant obtained by Odum from J.D. Arthur in 1929 is unusual. It has "an incipit and a chorus, as follows:
Come all you good people if you want to hear,
The story of a bad engineer,
Who ran a train on the downward road,
And every car held a heavy load.
The agent stood at the station door,
He welcomed the rich, he grabbed at the poor,
And everybody seemed jolly and gay,
As the hell-bound train sped on its way.

Come, my friend, give you heart to Jesus,
Come, my friend, join out [sic] happy band:
Come today and follow the Savior,
He will lead you safely to the promised land.

[Odum-Arthur MS 30, July 10, 1929]

The manuscript bears instruction ' to be sung to the tune of "Casey Jones," ' as might be inferred by scansion of the poem.

A considerably older poem on the same theme - that of a train that hauls drunkards to hell - was titled "Ride on the Black Valley Railroad" and credited to I.N. Tarbox in One Hundred Choice Selections No. 11 (1876) Here are some of the verses comparable to line in "The Hell-Bound Train":

A full supply of bad whiskey,
Four our engine is taken here;
And a queer looking fellow from Hades,
Steps on for our engineer.

Our engineer chuckles and dances,
In the wild lurid flashes he throws;
Hotter blaze the red fires of his furnace
As on in the blackness he goes.

Oh, the sound that we hear in the darkness,
The laughter and crying and groans;
The ravings of anger and madness,
The sobbings and pitiful moans.

[Also in Railroad and Current Mechanic 22 (Dec. 1913), 67.]

Poems such as this and the later "Hell-Bound Train," were special forms of more general theme often exploited in nineteenth-century compositions - the drunkard's dream, in which a confirmed alcoholic falls into a stupor and foresees the plight of his widow and orphaned children ten years hence, after he has been laid in the grave by Demon Rum.

Sincerest MERRY CHRISTMAS to ALL,
Gargoyle