Lightfoot's transportation fascination

“Trains and Boats and Planes” is the title of a Burt Bacharach song about love lost to travel. The phrase also perfectly captures Gordon Lightfoot’s lifelong fascination with the machinery of those forms of transportation and, more poetically, tales of romance and tragedy involving them. 

So many of Lightfoot’s songs reflect this interest. Three of his most famous compositions, “Canadian Railroad Trilogy,” “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” and “Early Morning Rain,” tell of the building of the trans-Canada railway, the sinking of an iron-ore-carrying freighter and of big 707 jetliners taking off without a young homesick Lightfoot aboard. 

Throughout his life, Lightfoot continued his love affair with airplanes, renting private Lear jets to fly from gig to gig—as much for the thrill as the convenience. And he took great pride when his son Eric became a pilot, flying Cessnas as part of the tourist-oriented air service on B.C.’s west coast.

When it came to boats, Lightfoot was both a sailor whose yachts crisscrossed Georgian Bay and a canoeist who journeyed to the Canadian north, paddling wilderness rivers like the Nahanni, the Churchill and the Coppermine. His Canary Yellow Canoe from those trips is now on display at the Canadian Canoe Museum.

And as for trains, the singer-songwriter not only chronicled Canada’s “iron road runnin' from the sea to the sea” but took part in a Canadian National Railway film for which he provided his song “Steel Rail Blues” and two additional numbers. Lightfoot also agreed to appear in the film, standing on tracks and in freight cars while talking about his love of the rails.

In later life, Lightfoot’s train travel was limited to Toronto’s subways. But his solitary practice of riding the Yonge line transported him back to his days of constant motion. “Everybody’s movin’,” he once sang, “nothin’ stays the same.”