This may be extremely obscure, or perhaps even a local thing, so I don’t really know if I’ll get an answer. I have been wondering about it for a while though, so I’ll ask:
Sometime in grade school (1990-1995) or POSSIBLY middle school (95-98), we went to Krannert Center in Champaign, Illinois to see a musical. This musical was about the transcontinental railroad.
It had one song I remeber in particular that went something like:
(something, something) spikes to the tie,
(something, something) ties to the rail,
(something, something) rails to the mile.
This may not be exactly right, but I don’t know. I remember the (something, something)s were numbers. I seem to remember there was an Irish “gandy-dancer”, that word which that musical added to my vocabulary.
I know this is probably fairly obscure. For all I know it might have been some U of I students and no-name playwright. However, I liked it, and it was interesting, and it’s been bugging me.
Any clue?
NOT MY JOB
I’m not allowed to run the train
The whistle I can’t blow
I’m not allowed to say how fast
The railroad train can go
I’m not allowed to shoot off steam
Nor can I clang the bell
But let the Damned train jump the track
And see who catches hell.
Did a web search for “gandy dancer” and this came up.
There was also an operetta by Percy Faith called The Gandy Dancer.
Hmm…well, thanks for the leads.
Quincyj68, I don’t think that’s it, it doesn’t ring a bell, and it seems a bit…rough…for a grade-school audience.
I if I remember, the gandy dancer wasn’t a huge part of the musical, just one song. I don’t know…
I couldn’t find the song, but this Railroad Operations page has quite a bit on estimating the number of ties and spikes over distance near the bottom of the page. (In case you were actually interested in the measuring indicated by the song.)
Similar info can be found at the [url=“http://www.akrailroad.com/track_assemble.html”]A & K Railroad Equipment* sales site, the
Okay, there is a guy named Charlie Chin who has some kind of musical presentation dealing with the Chinese-American contribution to the building of the transcontinental railroad.
http://www.speakersandartists.org/People/CharlieChin.html
http://www.asianamericanbooks.com/cclngtlk.htm
But that’s all I can find at the moment and I have to go to bed.