Dale Rose's account is pretty close to that in Norm Cohen's 'The Long Steel Rail'. Cohen gives the 1882 song "The Great Rock Island Route" showing that Kindt's version, copyrighted June 13, 1904, "The Wabash Cannonball", was a modest reworking of the earlier one. (But the tune of the 1904 version was not that used later).

Another song along this line is Henry Clay Work's "Crossing the Grand Sierras on the Lightning Palace Train", 1870. [This is on the Levy sheet music website, and in 'Henry Clay Work: Songs', reprint, Da Capo Press, 1974]. The song an tune sounds like something out of Gilbert and Sullivan, but was composed a few years before Gilbert met Sullivan.