Railroad Associations
The song is based on the name of the Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific Railroad, which operated an extensive network across the central states of the USA, Chicago to Omaha, Nebraska, Chicago to Texas, and reached Minneapolis, Minnesota, Memphis, Tennessee, and other points. Contrary to the song, although a minor route penetrated northern Louisiana, it did not reach New Orleans. Like a number of railroads based in Chicago with lengthy formal names, it was generally known by a shortened nickname, the "Rock Island", which name was painted on the locomotives and elsewhere. Rock Island is a small town on the Illinois shore of the Mississippi River, and the initial rail route connected it across the state to Chicago. The railroad's ambition, from its name, to reach the Pacific was never even remotely attained. The Rock Island was a rail pioneer from the 1850s, and was long known for carrying on through financial adversity challenging better-structured rival companies in its territory. It finally went out of business in 1980. Some of its former routes were purchased and are now run by other rail companies.
Read more about this topic: Rock Island Line (song)
Famous quotes containing the words railroad and/or associations:
“Though the railroad and the telegraph have been established on the shores of Maine, the Indian still looks out from her interior mountains over all these to the sea.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Writing prejudicial, off-putting reviews is a precise exercise in applied black magic. The reviewer can draw free- floating disagreeable associations to a book by implying that the book is completely unimportant without saying exactly why, and carefully avoiding any clear images that could capture the reader’s full attention.”
—William Burroughs (b. 1914)