Poor Paddy Works on the Railway

[2] Ernest Bourne recorded the first version, released in 1941, by Alan Lomax for the Library of Congress in 1938 under the title "A-working on the Railway".

"[4] The song was next mentioned as a chanty in R. C. Adams' On Board the Rocket (1879), in which the sea captain tells of experiences in American vessels out of Boston in the 1860s.

In this discussion he quotes "Paddy, Come Work on the Railway": Although these are among the earliest published references, there is other evidence to suggest that the chanty was sung as early as the 1850s.

A reminiscence from the 1920s, for example, claims its use at the windlass of the following verse, aboard a packet ship out of Liverpool in 1857: Several versions of this chanty were audio-recorded from the singing of veteran sailors in the 1920s–40s by folklorists like R. W. Gordon, J. M. Carpenter, and William Main Doerflinger.

The song reflects the work that thousands of Irish section crews did as track layers, gaugers, spikers, and bolters.