The colonel of the regiment, Sir David Hunter-Blair, having seen the volumes in the bookseller's shop previous to their delivery, wished to purchase them, and, on being told that they had already been subscribed for by one of his own men, was so much pleased that he gave orders to have them handsomely rebound and sent to Train free of charge.
Some time after the regiment was disbanded, he obtained for Train an agency for a manufacturing house in Glasgow, and in 1806–7 an appointment as supernumerary excise officer in the Ayr district.
[2] In 1811 Train was appointed to the Largs side in the Ayr district, and while there and at Newton Stewart in New Galloway, to which he was transferred in 1813, he had special opportunity for the collection of south-western tales and traditions.
While the work was passing through Ballantyne's press it attracted the attention of Sir Walter Scott, who was especially interested in the "notes illustrative of traditions in Galloway and Ayrshire", and immediately wrote to Train asking to be included in the list of subscribers for eleven copies.
In the interest of Scott, Train states that he became "still more zealous in the pursuit of ancient lore", and that his love of old traditions became so notorious that "even beggars, in the hope of reward, came from afar to Newton Stewart to recite old ballads and relate old stories" to him.
Old Mortality himself was mainly his discovery; but for him The Antiquary would have been ungraced by the quaint figure of Edie Ochiltree, and the bizarre apparition of Madge Wildfire would have been wanting from The Heart of Midlothian had he not told Scott the story of Feckless Fanny.
Train further succeeded in tracing the wall, of very ancient but unknown origin, called the Deil's Dyke, from Loch Ryan in Wigtownshire to the farm of Hightae in the parish of Lochmaben, Dumfriesshire, a distance of eighty miles.
Owing, however, to the then prevailing custom of reserving the highest offices of the excise mainly for Englishmen, the efforts of Scott for the advancement of Train to the rank of general supervisor or collector were unsuccessful.
James Hannay, editor of the Edinburgh Courant who records in Household Words of 10 July 1853 a visit which he paid to Train, states that his "little parlour was full of antiquities", and describes him as "a tall old man, with an autumnal red in his face, hale-looking, and of simple quaint manners".
After his retirement from the excise in 1836, he took up his residence in a cottage near Castle Douglas, where he occupied his leisure in contributing to Chambers's Journal and other periodicals, in completing his Historical and Statistical Account of the Isle of Man, from the earliest time to the present date, with a view of its peculiar customs and popular superstitions (1845), and in writing an account of the local religious sect known as the Buchanites, under the title The Buchanites from First to Last (1846).