The Engineers Don’t Wave from the Trains Anymore

The lyric is a grown man’s memory of boyhood. He used to hang around the tracks watching the trains run to Louisville and back. He planned to be an engineer himself, and the crews who waved to the children by the line were his heroes. That was back in 1954, the song says. Now there are computers and diesels, and the engineers have forgotten the little boys and girls. What remains is the faraway look an old train in the night still brings on. The Louisville run sets the song in Kentucky, where Hall grew up, in Olive Hill.

Hall sings it alone on the record. The Bluegrass Discography lists Earl Scruggs on banjo, Randy Scruggs on guitar and electric guitar, Byron Berline on fiddle and five-string fiddle, Jerry Douglas on dobro, Paul Uhrig on bass, Clyde Brooks on drums, Gene Sisk on Rhodes electric piano and Gary Scruggs on harmonica.

Bluegrass bands have kept the song going since. The Lynn Morris Band recorded it for The Bramble and the Rose. The Crowe Brothers, the Boiled Buzzards and the Looping Brothers, on Wrong Road Again (2017), have cut it too.