Enoch gradually expanded the small shipping operation his cousin had established and by the 1830s had taken over the business, with multiple vessels trading with Cape Verde, Europe and South America.

Train was an active member of the Whig Party and was elected to public office twice: first, to the Boston Common Council in 1840, and second, to the Massachusetts House of Representatives in 1848.

[11] By the time Enoch joined his firm, Samuel Train was already operating a small brig to trade with the Cape Verde islands for the raw hides and skins important for his leather-goods business.

During this period, he continued to trade with multiple European countries but switched to South America rather than Cape Verde as his source of skins and hides; his most notable ships were the Sterling, Forum, St. Petersburg, Governor Davis and Dorchester.

For the first several years of its existence he used agents to represent the line in England, but in 1850 he established a branch office in Liverpool, where it was known as Train & Co.[2][13] During a visit to England at the start of 1844 to make arrangements for his new packet line, Train chanced to meet a captain named Dennis Condry whose own ship, the Delia Walker, had been built in Newburyport, MA under the supervision of a young shipbuilder called Donald McKay.

At the end of 1856 Train ceded control of his packet line to his two junior partners, Frederick W. Thayer and George Warren, and in February 1857 he declared insolvency.

[16] Enoch Train saw the future of steam-powered ships and in 1855, along with James Bebee, Andrew Hall, Donald McKay, and George Upton, formed the Boston & European Steamship Company, ″for the purpose of navigating the ocean by steam″ .