“Old Train” is associated with Herb Pedersen’s songwriting and was first recorded by the Seldom Scene on their 1974 Rebel album Old Train, which took its title from this song. Pedersen, the California-based banjoist and songwriter, has been a quiet but consequential figure in the Southern California bluegrass and country-rock scenes since the late 1960s, and this is one of his most-covered original compositions.
A notable recording is the Tony Rice Unit’s reading on Manzanita (1979), the album that effectively defined Rice’s solo identity. Rice’s harmonically open guitar work, the unit’s restrained instrumental arrangement, and the slower tempo pulled the song into the more open register that defined the album.
The lyric is a leaving-and-distance piece: the narrator on an old train heading away from a relationship that has run its course, the rhythm of the rails pulling him further from a return that was never going to happen anyway. The harmonic shape is open and three-chord, the song works comfortably as a moderate-tempo vocal feature in G or A, and the chorus harmony slot opens on the tag line that names the train.
