27 April 1947 -- Debut of Illinois Central Railroad’s Original City of New Orleans

“City of New Orleans” -- Arlo Guthrie (Steve Goodman, music and lyrics)

At age 20, Chicago native Steve Goodman received a death sentence. He was diagnosed with leukemia  Not being one to fade quietly into the night, however, he refused to surrender to the inevitable. Instead, he chose to pursue his hopes with whatever time fate had allotted him. Upon learning that his time short, Steve abandoned his college plans to focus fulltime on songwriting and singing. He packed a lot of living into his 36 years of life, marrying his girlfriend and eventually becoming father to three daughters. Steve would also prove himself a consummate Chicago Cubs fan, even going so far as to compose the official Chicago Cubs victory song -- well, none of us are without flaws. Goodman’s widow Nancy Pruter would later describe her late husband:

Basically, Steve was exactly who he appeared to be: an ambitious, well-adjusted man from a loving, middle-class Jewish home in the Chicago suburbs, whose life and talent were directed by the physical pain and time constraints of a fatal disease which he kept at bay, at times, seemingly by willpower alone . . . Steve wanted to live as normal a life as possible, only he had to live it as fast as he could . . . He extracted meaning from the mundane.

Steve Goodman appearing at the

Ann Arbor Folk Music Festival, January 1978.

Leukemia would steal his life

on 20 September the same year.

Steve’s marriage to Nancy would -- albeit indirectly -- have a lasting effect on American folk music. Shortly after the union, the couple rode the Illinois Central line southward to visit her family. As Nancy slept, Steve composed lyrics describing the journey on a sketch pad. Later learning the line was to be retired, Steve returned to the lyrics, altering them to reflect the train’s imminent demise.

In 1971, Arlo Guthrie was playing the Quiet Knight Bar, a now defunct nightclub located in Chicago’s theater district. At closing, Steve approached Guthrie, proposing the already established and moderately successful singer listen to and perhaps record his recently completed composition. Now Arlo Guthrie, being a famous singer and the son of an even more famous singer, undoubtedly suffered many a hopeful amateur pitching lyrics his way over the years. He thought Steve to be just one more. Guthrie later described that meeting to an Australian audience in 2004:

Back around 1971, I was playing in a bar in Chicago one night, and after the show, I was packing up my guitar and stuff, and I was walking out the door, and a little guy stopped me. And he said, "Arlo, before you leave, I wanna sing you a song." I said "Come on man, I don't wanna hear no songs. I hate songs. I don't even like my songs! Why should I like your songs?" I was just tired, I wanted to get out of there, I was being a butt-head. He said, "Arlo, I just wanna sing you one song." I said, "Tell you what. Buy me beer. I'll sit here and drink it. As long as it lasts, you can do whatever you want." He said, "That sounds like a good deal." I said "It does?" It turned out to be one of the finer beers of my entire life.

Arlo Guthrie tells Oklahoma City fans of his first meeting with Steve Goodman.

And that is how Arlo Guthrie came to record Steve Goodman’s anthem to Illinois Central Railroad’s famed City of New Orleans train.

“City of New Orleans” -- Arlo Guthrie (Steve Goodman, music and lyrics)

Riding on the City of New Orleans

Illinois Central Monday morning rail

Fifteen cars and fifteen restless riders

Three conductors and twenty-five sacks of mail

All along the southbound odyssey

The train pulls out at Kankakee

Rolls along past houses, farms and fields

Passin' trains that have no names

Freight yards full of old black men

And the graveyards of the rusted automobiles

Good morning America how are you?

Don't you know me I'm your native son

I'm the train they call The City of New Orleans

I'll be gone five hundred miles when the day is done

Dealin' cards games with the old men in the club car

Penny a point, ain't no one keepin' score

Pass the paper bag that holds the bottle

Feel the wheels rumblin' 'neath the floor

And the sons of Pullman porters

And the sons of engineers

Ride their father's magic carpets made of steam

Mothers with their babes asleep

Are rockin' to the gentle beat

And the rhythm of the rails is all they feel

Good morning America how are you?

Said don't you know me I'm your native son

I'm the train they call The City of New Orleans

I'll be gone five hundred miles when the day is done

Nighttime on The City of New Orleans

Changing cars in Memphis, Tennessee

Half way home, we'll be there by morning

Through the Mississippi darkness

Rolling down to the sea

But all the towns and people seem

To fade into a bad dream

And the steel rails still ain't heard the news

The conductor sings his songs again

The passengers will please refrain

This train's got the disappearing railroad blues

Good night, America, how are you?

Said don't you know me I'm your native son

I'm the train they call The City of New Orleans

I'll be gone five hundred miles when the day is done

Today, more people know of the song than they do of the train for which it was titled. Goodman’s song is certainly wonderful and merits all the praise it garners, I cannot help but rue its namesake being so unknown to a population seemingly unaware that until fairly recently, railroads were the preferred method of long-distance passenger service across the United States.

Congress in 1850 passed a bill, later signed into law by the much maligned President Millard Fillmore, giving federal lands to corporations for construction of continental railways. On 10 February 1851, the Illinois General Assembly chartered the Illinois Central, thereby creating America’s land-grant railroad. Two of the railroad’s earliest proponents were the two most famous political rivals of that turbulent decade, Illinois favorite sons Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas. Divided they might have been on politics and slavery, both these ambitious men thought railroads to be a suture of sorts, possibly hindering the rapid sectional fracturing of antebellum America.

The northernmost terminus was then and would remain Chicago, but the Illinois Central reached ever southward until 1878 when the constant mergers of rail lines made New Orleans the most distant railhead. Only a century ago, a harried passenger in Chicago’s Central Station could board the luxurious Panama Express in the afternoon and debark the following morning at New Orleans’ Grand Union Station.

Such was the success of the Panama Express that Illinois Central saw fit to introduce sister service during daylight hours. And so, on 27 April 1947 the City of New Orleans departed Chicago, in route parts southward. About 16 hours later, it arrived in the city for which it was named. At 921 miles, the City of New Orleans was the longest daylight rail route in the United States.

Illinois Central promotes its passenger lines

when trains were yet a fashionable method of travel.

By the time of that southward trek that inspired Steve Goodman to compose the song that would eventually make him famous, passenger railroads were in decline. The City of New Orleans was dying. Interstate highways and air travel had sealed her fate. On 14 November 1971, only eight months before Arlo Guthrie would score his only “top-forty” hit with “The City of New Orleans,” the train, now operated by Amtrak, was moved to a nighttime schedule and renamed the Panama Limited.

Ten years following, because of the lingering popularity of Steve Goodman’s composition, Amtrak graced the train now retracing the route of the City of New Orleans, albeit now at night, with its former name. One final note, and I speak here from experience. If you have never experienced the "southbound odyssey" which proved to be Steve Goodman's muse, you have missed a wonder which would widen even the jaded eyes of Odysseus himself.