If you listen to the other songs on that album , there are several train related songs on that. The Dead started playing in bars in 1968 but did not have a recording contract for a long time because they insisted on having complete artistic control. they played at Woodstock, but it wasn't recorded, so nobody knows about it. In i972, they had this crazy plan to do a u
European tour. They didn't just take the band, they took thier roadies, every bodies families and thier whole crew, so the tour was not a money maker. The plan was to pay for the tour with sales of the live album. Only they had technical difficulties , and no song from the whole tour was useable. they had to cut and splice tape from several performances to get any song into any kind of usable form, I didn't know this for many years, this has always been one of my favorites, the dead Liked long songs, one of the reasons they didn't get much air time. some of thier stuff is heavy psychedelic rock, but a lot of it is derived from folk music, Jerry Garcia, the lead guitarist, and nominal band leader, ["you can call me boss, just don't ask me to make any decisions".), was a skilled bluegrass banjo player, others in the band had blues, and even classical backgrounds, so thier music was at times all over the place. The early 70s was probably my favorite era, but they were always interesting, a live concert fills 3 Cds, and they taped almost all of them, so there is more music available than most bands could dream of.