Division Point? Segragation Point? Get all the passengers on a 10 car train in one car?BTW Arlo Guthrie is doing another 18 month tour.
Fifteen cars, he said. “Ten cars” throws the meter off if you try to sing it that way. And he wanted a rhyme for “rolling down to the sea.”
Memphis is about as far south as the City of New Orleans could go in Tennessee before it went into Mississippi. And Tennessee is notorious for having the very first law mandating segregation (note sp.) in railroad cars, passed in 1881. So not likely it was a Jim Crow requirement. Since the City of New Orleans was a day train, IIRC arriving in Memphis in the early to mid afternoon either way, it becomes somewhat clearer that ‘poetic license’ is behind much of the wording of the lyrics…
I don’t know that the song says IC did it, maybe Steve Goodman wrote it because the passenger in his song wanted to change cars. It’s great to hear that Arlo Guthrie’s touring, but what does he have to do with City of New Orleans, or even this song about the National Limited:
Riding on the Remnant of St Louie
Pennsylvania’s badly battered rails
15 cars and 15 restless riders
passenger slowly turning pale
and on our eastbound oddity
the train pulls out of Kansas C
past factories, slums and roads
being passed by trains that have no names
and freight yards full of shippers claims
the ghostly hulk moves onward down the road
Good morning Terra Haute how are you
Don’t you know me I’m your errant son
I’m the train they call the Remant of St Louie
I’ll be gone 100 miles fore my day is done
Trading insults with the steward in the diner
With yesterday’s chicken ain’t no use keeping score
pass the alka seltzer after dinner
if you don’t you’ll be crawling on the floor
and the sons of pullman porters
and the sons of engineers
wonder how their fathers bought this lousy deal
the conductor sings his song again
the passengers are well restrained
this train’s got the disappearing service blues
Good morning Steubenville how are you
Don’t you know me I’m your errant son
I’m the train they call the Remant of St Louie
I’ll be gone 100 miles fore my day is done
Nightime on the Remnant of St Louie
Changing tracks in Lewistown PA
Halfway home and we’ll be there some morning
All you gotta do is get on your knees and pray
and all the towns and people scream
it’s all part of a vile scheme
as the train stops once again to change its crew
mothers can’t keep their babies asleep
the rocking’s more a crash
Ok 15 cars but I have been on many a train where at the end of the line you have 20 passenger scattered over 10 cars or more like 8 these days and the conductor closes cars to keep everyone together so he does not have to walk as far. Take the Ethan Allen for example.
The last time I rode the IC’s City of New Orleans was in the spring of 1970, and I rode from Carbondale to Carrollton Avenue (we were a little late, leaving Memphis at nine in the evening, and losing more time all the way; I did not want to miss Southern’s Crescent; anything could happen when a train is being turned on the wye before backing into the station in New Orleans). I did not have to change cars in Memphis, so when I first heard the song I thought it bore some resemblance to my experience except for the changing cars–which may be artistic license put in, as has been mentioned, to have a rhyme that scans.
I guess Arlo Guthrie is the singer who gave the City of New Orleans song a big lift, but you’re right–those lyrics (and the correct turns in the tune) came from Chicago’s own Steve Goodman (may he rest in peace after a life cut 'way too short by leukemia).
Steve Goodman’s 800 page biography is FACING THE MUSIC by Clay Eals, now in its third printing. I haven’t read the book in a few years, but my recollection is that Steve hadn’t ridden the “City” south of the Ohio River at the time he wrote the song. So “changing cars in Memphis, Tennessee” was probably a product of his very fertile imagination.
Steve was from Chicago, and he rode it a number of times as a college student before he began his “real job” as an entertainer and song writer; but he didn’t write the song until after he and his wife Nancy had ridden the train south from Chicago to southern Illinois to visit her relatives. I understand he did ride the train all the way to New Orleans at some point after the song had been recorded by Arlo Guthrie and others, and had become famous. I doubt that Steve went to the trouble of counting “25 sacks of mail”, and I don’t think the train required “three conductors”.
By the way, some of his original lyrics have frequently been changed by other singers, including Arlo. The original lines were “they ride their fathers’ magic carpet made of steam (not steel); and mothers with their babes asleep go rockin’ to the gentle beat. The rhythm of the rails is all they dream (not feel)”. “Passing towns that have no name” has become “trains that have no name”. John Denver even changed the melody, fudged the credits, and changed “old black men” to “old gray men”. Sacrilege!
Check out some of Steve’s other songs and you will see that he wasn’t beyond stretching the truth a bit to make a good story. The lyrics of novelty tunes like “Lincoln Park Pirates”, “Turnpike Tom”, “Chicken Cordon Bleus”, “Door Number Three” (written with Jimmy Buffet), “The Dying Cub Fan’s Last Request”, an
If you do a You Tube search for Steve Goodman “City of New Orleans” you can find a great live performance by Steve at an affair hosted by Johnny Cash. It’s a treat to see and hear “CONY” performed by the man himself.
By the way, a young Vince Gill sings back-up for Steve.
There’s Arlo Guthrie’s version, Steve Goodman’s version, Willie Nelson’s version (done with Johnny Cash, Kris Kristofferson and Waylon Jennings) and honestly I can’t say which one I like the best.
I can say: Steve’s original version, preferably with no accompaniment except his own acoustic guitar. It’s the first version I ever heard, & it’ll stick with me till I go where he went before.
Runner up is his Austin City Limits performance with Jethro Burns on mandolin.
Gotcha all!
According to the attached link…Cars were switched on and off the City of New Orleans in Memphis, TN. So it is plausible as a safety measure that the author of the song was asked to relocate to a car not being switched as a safety precaution? Heh-heh, Gotcha!
Read text under IC Switcher #480 coupled onto the CNO Observation…
http://condrenrails.com/MRP/MemphisCentralStation/IC-Memphis-Pass-Pixs.htm
You must have missed that “previously loaded Memphis coaches” in that text you mentioned. If they were not concerned about people in the cars actually being switched, they wouldn’t be concerned about people in the standing train…
The song describes a southbound trip. Number 2, a northbound train, is shown in the photos having coaches added in Memphis. If the train carried extra cars north of Memphis, normal practice on the southbound run would be to assign through passengers to the through cars and “shorts” to the cars being removed in Memphis. Since Steve & his wife didn’t go all the way to Memphis on the trip that inspired the song, they would have had no real reason to be concerned with changing cars in Memphis. I repeat: That line is probably fiction.
Methinks we’re assuming that the riders changed cars. Maybe the lyrics refer to the removal of the cars themselves. It would have likely made for a slightly longer than usual stop, thus a notable event.
Maybe the cars being changed were RPO cars or other mail cars?
… I was drunk
the day my mama
got out of prison [8][8]… [:-^]
That is a really good collection of photos…
And I’d tend to agree with other posts that “changing cars” might refer to switching cars in and out of the train as clearly did occur in Memphis…
And there is a CRI&P TA in one of those Memphis shots.
M636C
I would have to go with “switching” cars based on the fact that back in the fifties our train waited at Durand for the train from Port Huron and we took one car from that. Then our train continued west toward Owosso.
Steve Goodman was my roommate for one semester in Urbana before he dropped out (and prior to writing “CNO”). He was a warm, funny and very generous guy as well as a talented musician. However, as I recall, he was a wee bit careless about details.
I rode N.O. to Chicago in 1963. I was in the last car, and I remember that they added cars to the rear in Memphis. The song, though, as someone mentioned was not intended to be a documentary. It was intended to convey a mood, which it does successfully.
One more factor that supports the idea that it’s fiction. It’s indisputable that the song describes a southbound trip: “…out on the southbound odyssey, the train rolls out of Kankakee…” I don’t have an extensive collection of Official Guides, but my January, 1971 issue (fairly close to the time when the song was written) says that I.C. no. 1, the southbound City of New Orleans, arrived in Memphis at 4:41 p.m., and departed Memphis at 6:01 p.m. I don’t think we can reconcile this with “Nighttime on the City of New Orleans, changing cars in Memphis, Tennessee.” It’s dinner time; not nighttime. But dinner time doesn’t fit, so Steve said nighttime. It fits, so he used it. Artistic license.
Incidentally, the northbound “City” arrived Memphis at 2:15 p.m. and departed at 2:35 p.m., so it wasn’t in Memphis at night either.
Undoubtedly, there were more than “fifteen restless riders”. I doubt that Steve bothered to count.
Tom