Songfacts®:

• In this 1966 folk-pop number, Vashti Bunyan boards a northbound train to reunite with her faraway lover. It tells a much different story than the original version, titled "17 Pink Sugar Elephants," written a few years earlier when Bunyan was still a student at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art at Oxford University. When Bunyan's roommate, Jenny Lewis, came home slightly intoxicated one night, the pair wrote a fun song about drunken hallucinations.
  
  Bunyan recalled in her autobiography, Wayward: Just Another Life To Live: "We sat on the floor with our guitars and started to laugh about seeing pink elephants, playing around with the different chords we were starting to find. Together we wrote 'Seventeen pink sugar elephants, sitting under a chestnut tree.' Magic everywhere."
  
  She didn't think much of the song again until she began her music career in earnest. During a dry spell after the failure of her debut single, "Some Things Just Stick In Your Mind," she remembered a stack of poems she received from Alasdair Clayre, an intense poet she met during her first year at Ruskin. One of them was called "Train Song" and paired perfectly with the music she wrote with Lewis.
• After leaving Rolling Stones' producer Andrew Loog Oldham behind, Bunyan teamed up with Canadian producer Peter Snell to record "Train Song," which featured her voice backed by a cello, a double bass, and two guitars. It was released as a single in 1966, but it received little promotion.
• Bunyan, who had long given up her music career, finally got her due when her 1970 album, Just Another Diamond Day, was reissued in 2000 and hailed as an alternative-folk classic. Her other tunes like "Train Song" also got attention, cropping up in adverts and TV shows. It's also one of her most popular songs on Spotify, with more than 18 million streams.
  
  In a 2023 Songfacts Podcast interview, Bunyan reflected on the song's delayed success (she splits the royalties with Lewis and the late Clayre's nephew):
  
  "It's not just the royalties, but it's the recognition of that song that has been so extraordinary for all of us. And it's been used in adverts, it's been used in film scores. It's grown without me having to do anything for it at all. I remember the session and how incredible it was to just be recording a song simply, and that it has worked all these years later, it's lovely."
• This was used in Reebok's "Join The Migration" ad for the NFL in 2008.
• This served as the opening theme song to the TV series The Patriot during its first season in 2015.
  
  It was also used in these TV shows:
  
  True Detective ("Seeing Things" - 2014)
  Parenthood ("Promises" - 2014)
  Waterloo Road ("The Madness Of King Windsor" - 2013)
  
  And these movies:
  
  Journey To A Mother's Room (2018)
  Miss Sixty (2014)
• Death Cab For Cutie frontman Ben Gibbard collaborated with Canadian singer Feist on a cover of this for the HIV/AIDS charity compilation Dark Was The Night in 2009.
• Bunyan was kicked out of Ruskin because she and the school's stern principal didn't share the same views on art. She told Songfacts: "I was thrown out after two years because I really preferred to be playing my guitar and writing songs and all kinds of other things that weren't to do with drawing and painting. And when I said to the principal of the art school, 'I thought that art was art in any medium,' and he said, 'Well, you go and do your art somewhere else. Here, you paint and draw,' I had to leave. But I'm really glad that I was able to leave. I wasn't interested in painting and drawing, although I could do it. I had always loved it when I was a child, but it wasn't my ambition. I found much more joy in playing guitar and writing songs."