“I’d Like to Be a Train” is a bluegrass song written by Leroy Drumm and Pete Goble, the latter one of the most prolific songwriters in the music. It was introduced on record by Larry Sparks and the Lonesome Ramblers, who released it in the late 1980s.
The song builds on one of bluegrass music’s favorite images. Its narrator wishes he could be a train — free to roll away down the line, leaving heartache and trouble behind — turning the old railroad imagery of the genre into a fantasy of escape. Larry Sparks’s deep, weathered voice suited that restless, hard-luck longing.
The song has stayed in circulation among bluegrass musicians and reached a new audience in recent years through performances by Billy Strings, who has drawn many older Sparks numbers into his repertoire. It remains a representative example of the train-song tradition that runs all through bluegrass.
