This song was commissioned from Lightfoot by the CBC for a special broadcast on January 1, 1967, to start Canada's
Centennial year. Writing and composing it took him three days. It appeared on Lightfoot's album
The Way I Feel later in the same year along with the song "Crossroads", a shorter song of similar theme. The structure of the song, with a slow
tempo section in the middle and faster paced sections at the beginning and end, was patterned more or less opposite to
Bob Gibson's and
Hamilton Camp's "Civil War Trilogy", famously recorded by
The Limeliters on the 1963 live album
Our Men In San Francisco. In the first section, the song picks up speed like a
locomotive building up a head of steam. While Lightfoot's song echoes the optimism of the railroad age, it also chronicles the cost in sweat and blood of building "an iron road runnin' from the sea to the sea". The slow middle section of the song is especially poignant, vividly describing the efforts and sorrows of the nameless and forgotten "
navvies", whose manual labour actually built the railway. Session personnel for the 1967 recording were these: Gordon Lightfoot on 12-string acoustic guitar, Red Shea on lead acoustic guitar, John Stockfish on Fender bass guitar, and
Charlie McCoy on harmonica. == Legacy ==