Any railroad man will tell you truly,
If you ballast the ties with river stone,
Your rolling stock is most sure to de-rail.
All your back-breaking labor laying track
Will have earned you no further capital gain.
I don’t even want to hear you complain.
You can’t make the base for the needed grade
By taking cheap and amateurish shortcuts.
You’ll find such lazy effort only leads
Your precious locomotive off the line,
And so, to see the sad end of a train.
Just like chalk art in a hard driven rain.
An engineer can keep his smokebox clean,
But ballast drift will ruin his machine.
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