Down by the Station

The song begins as an observation: small steam engines are standing in a row early in the morning. The final line turns the scene into sound. “Puff” imitates escaping steam, “toot” imitates the whistle, and the engines move off. The older word “Pufferbilly” works as a playful name for those little locomotives, so even a child who does not know the word can understand it from the sounds and actions around it.

The earliest text used for this page is the four-line “Pufferbilly Song” printed in Recreation magazine in 1931. A University of Rochester catalogue also records a 1948 sheet-music version associated with Lee Ricks and Slim Gaillard. That later publication added material, but it does not make Ricks and Gaillard the authors of the anonymous 1931 verse; this page therefore keeps to the earlier four-line form rather than silently combining the two.

Its structure makes the song easy to turn into group play. Children can stand in a row like engines, turn an imaginary handle with the driver, release two soft bursts of steam and answer them with two whistle sounds. The sequence gives every singer a cue to listen for, and the whole line can then move forward together on “off we go.”