Canadian Railroad Trilogy

To many Canadians, this song is instantly identifiable by its opening chords. The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) hired Lightfoot to write the song for a segment in the two-hour special 100 Years Young, which aired on New Year's Day, 1967 in celebration of Canada's centennial. The segment tells the story of the Canadian Pacific Railway.

In the liner notes to his Complete Greatest Hits compilation, Gordon Lightfoot explained how he put this song together. CBC producer Bob Jarvis sent him to the network's library for research, and Lightfoot found a book about the railroad's chief engineer, Sir William Van Horne, which he used as the basis for the lyric. "I got the idea to write it long from a mentor of mine named Bob Gibson, who is a major figure in the folk revival," Lightfoot wrote. "He had written a song called 'Civil War Trilogy,' which had a slow part in the middle, and I followed that pattern. Without a piece of input like that, I probably wouldn't have been able to approach the song on that basis." Lightfoot adds that he got a compliment from the author Pierre Berton, who wrote a book about the railway called The National Dream: The Great Railway, 1871-1881. Berton told him the song said as much as the book.

In the line, "We are the navvies who work upon the railway," "navvies" are what the laborers who worked on the railroad were called, short for "navigators."