Wolverine,... To Annandale... Steely Dan Lyrics.... Doah!

[rrdude]

While rocking the classics today, enjoying the "sights" and lovely traffic on I-95 SB to Silver Spring, MD, Steely Dan's "My Old School" came on, and being as Dumb-as-I-Always-Have-Been, I had never listened closely to the words before:

"I remember the thirty-five sweet goodbyes

When you put me on the Wolverine
Up to Annandale
It was still September
When your daddy was quite surprised
To find you with the working girls
In the county jail
I was smoking with the boys upstairs
When I heard about the whole affair
I said oh no
William and Mary won't do........."

Well, as stated above, I thought to myself, "Is there a city in Michigan (my home state) called "Annandale" that I don't know about? Google! No, appears not. I know of Annandale, VA.... And William & Mary is in Williamsburg, VA........

Google some more!

Seems the NYC called one of it's NYC-Buffalo-Chicago trains "The Wolverine" and I assume it went up the Hudson River Valley, and passengers may have disembarked for Annandale at Rhinecliff, NY?

Does anyone know if after Buffalo (WB) it then went thru Canada (Like Amtrak's old Niagara Rainbow) and thence along the MCRR-NYC to Chicago? I'm just assuming it did, because of the name.

What other songs, with Railroad References, have stumped you?

Or, like me, after decades of listening, what songs with RR refs finally made the dim light bulb above your head finally go "on"?

 

[The Davy Crockett]

California tumbles into the sea

That'll be the day I go

Back to Annandale

Tried to warn you

About Chino and Daddy Gee

But I can't seem to get to you

Through the U.S. Mail

Well I hear the whistle but I can't go...

I don't know if this is true or not, but I found this at the website songfacts.com:

The "Old School" referred to in this song is Bard College in Annendale, New York, where Donald Fagen and Walter Becker met. The song is at least partially inspired by an event that occurred at Bard, where both Becker and Fagen, along with their girlfriends, were arrested in a pot raid on a party that was orchestrated by an ambitious young District Attorney named G. Gordon Liddy (hence the line "Tried to warn ya about Geno and Daddy G"). Despite the fact that Califor

nia has not (yet) tumbled into the sea, both Fagen and Becker have returned to Bard.

And my own observation (which I have every once in a while... hboy: )

"Well I hear the whistle but I can't go..." ? :blink:

Even WAY,WAY back in the early 1970s, steam had been retired from almost all commercial rail operations in The States...

Don't they mean horn?

 

[Ispolkom]

Does anyone know if after Buffalo (WB) it then went thru Canada (Like Amtrak's old Niagara Rainbow) and thence along the MCRR-NYC to Chicago? I'm just assuming it did, because of the name.

That's exactly what train #8 The Wolverine did in the 1953 NYC timetable. At that time it didn't stop in Annandale, but it did meet up with the New England Wolverine in Albany.