Last of the Steam-Powered Trains

Recorded two months after steam trains were retired from passenger service in the UK, the song relates to Village Green's themes of preservation and the reconciling of past and present.

[13] The finishing recording is uncharacteristically live-sounding compared to the others on Village Green;[14] to ensure his voice cut through the loud instrumental backing, Davies changed his original throaty-vocal to a more nasally tone.

[18] We were unrehearsed for the most part, and the best way to slot in my guitar with the rest of the band was to find a riff that complemented the particular tune we were playing.

[20][nb 4] In the early 1960s, "Smokestack Lightning" was commonly covered by British rhythm-and-blues groups, like the High Numbers (later the Who), the Yardbirds and Manfred Mann.

[21][nb 5] Davies thought the song "one of the greatest records of its type",[17] and the Kinks regularly included it in their early live set lists before dropping it in the mid-1960s as the popularity of R&B began to diminish in the UK.

[26] The musicologist Matthew Gelbart describes "Trains" as having a twenty-four-bar structure that is "proportionally correct" in comparison to a standard twelve-bar blues.

[26] The band biographer Johnny Rogan describes the song as an "onomatopoeic exercise", since both harmonica and guitar play together to imitate the sound of a rolling train.

He writes that like the character in the song "Johnny Thunder", the train has avoided succumbing to middle-class values like his friends but at the cost of living forever in a museum.

[44] When the band held their first American tour in over four years in late 1969, the song became a regular in their live set and was sometimes played as the opening number.

[49] In Paul Williams review of the album for Rolling Stone, he wrote that it made him smile to know the Kinks finally recorded "Smokestack Lightning", "and [they did] a good job of it too".

"[50] In a retrospective assessment, Morgan Enos of Billboard magazine describes the song as an "inspired goof", being a parody of bands like Them and the Yardbirds.

[51] Among band biographers, Clinton Heylin considers it one of the better songs on Village Green while also finding it disruptive to the album's conceptual cohesiveness.