Lac Megantic

Wooden Shoe Ramblers version. Written in 2013 shortly after the fatal derailing of an oil train in Lac-Megantic, Quebec, this song was first performed publicly at the 2017 Lac Megantic rail workers legal defense benefit show in Minneapolis, organized by Rail Workers United, the IWW-GDC, and SMART. 

That oil train is three miles long, coming down the track
Its wheels are pitted iron and its barrels long and black
Those barrel cars are long as night and blacker than the crow
Riding from Alberta to the Gulf of Mexico
Looks we’ll be here for a while, but then that’s nothing new
The North Star line is always stalled when the oil train comes through
It’s been that way these past few years ever since the boom began
Riding from the Bakken Shale or the Athabasca Sands

I heard there was an accident on a line out in Quebec
In the town of Lac Megantic was an oil hauler wreck
Said she came in without warning in the small hours of the night
There was screaming on the rails and then the air was full of light

Old cars on old tracks, just one conductor on the shift
The MMA had cut its costs, it was in the name of thrift
Switched off the job in Nantes, with an engine fire to kill
But those brakes gave out past midnight, she came rolling down the hill

And down in Lac Megantic at the new Music Cafe
The people crowded in to hear Bolduc and Ricard play
They were singing to the old Chansons, la vie et l’amore
Without thinking on the railroad tracks that ran outside the door

And she was moving fast and faster down the main line in the night
Her bells were deadly quiet and her wheels were smoking white
And the ground shook like an avalanche when she hit the bend downtown
The sky was raining fire when that oil train came down

The sun was rising red over the black and bloody smoke
The ground was still burning where the oil train had broke
For 47 dead and gone they’d ring the chapel bell
When she rode like the Pale Horseman and what followed her was hell

That oil train is three miles long, coming down the track
Its wheels are pitted iron and its barrels long and black
Those barrel cars are long as night and blacker than the crow
Riding from Alberta to the Gulf of Mexico
Right through here is where they go; right through here is where they go.