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Gone are the railroads, our link to the past,
Here come the truckloads, they're moving so fast;
Our children must ride on a boat or a plane,
To go to the mainland just to see a train.
No leisurely walks on the tracks before bed,
The tracks that we see will be tracks in our heads;
As we look at the scars on the face of our land,
Left by the train tracks that once crossed Newfoundland.
We wonder just where the old Bullet went,
And think of the waste and the sweat that was spent;
For the back breaking labour of men laid to rest,
They stripped all the tracks in the name of progress.
And progress is pushing us on right ahead,
But who'll hold the key to the past when we're dead?
They're stripping away the dear and the old,
How long before all of our heritage is sold?
Gone are the railroads, our link to the past,
And the back breaking labour of men laid to rest;
They're stripping the ties from the railway bed,
Who'll hold the key to the past when we're dead?
Yes, who'll hold the key to the past when we're dead?
Recorded by Susan Lawrence (Susan Lawrence, trk#4, 1990, produced by Wade Jones playing all instruments and Gus Burton of the Soirees, recorded at Rainbow Studio, St. John's, NL).
The YouTube video above was produced by the Newfoundland Television Network (NTV) in St. John's, NL, for use as a filler when ad space had not been sold for certain time slots. This method of filling empty ad space is still employed by NTV today to expose local talent to the television audience.
From The Canadian Encyclopedia:
Newfie Bullet - affectionate but ironic name informally applied to the transinsular Newfoundland passenger railway in its latter days. A narrow-gauge train, winding 900 km around lakes and mountains from St John's to Channel-Port aux Basques (track completed in 1898), the Newfie Bullet was not noted for its speed. In the late 1960s the Canadian National Railway (CNR) replaced the subsidized passenger service with a bus service. (See Joan Morrissey's humourous ballad about The CN Bus.)
