ABOARD THE CITY OF NEW ORLEANS—As this fabled passenger train sways and rumbles through the darkness of the Mississippi Delta, northbound near Memphis, the coach seats are nearly full and the dining car, in its third seating, is running out of food.

How about a cheeseburger, asks one middle-aged dining car attendant, flamboyant, bearing a wide grin.

     “Don’t get mad at me,” he says. “The waiter is very sensitive.”

     The slim late-evening food offerings stir up dismay among hungry passengers. But they also speak to the revived popularity of a history-rich passenger line stretching between Chicago and the Crescent City, one covering 926 miles and requiring 19 hours on average to traverse.

     Airport hassles and rising gas prices for car travel are influencing a rise in use of this and other Amtrak lines. But part of the credit, oddly, must go to a ballad penned four decades ago.

The song “City of New Orleans” tantalizes with glimpses of an ever-changing scene just beyond the tinted windows — vast green or brown crop fields, tidy hamlets that hug the track’s shoulders, dark patches of tall hardwoods, rusting industrial yards. And it touches on the culture of rail travel, on strangers whiling away hours in the club car, playing cards and talking with the children of Pullman porters who sustain railroad work traditions.

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Musical threads run through the story of the City of New Orleans, a line operated for many years by the Illinois Central Railroad before its takeover by federally-subsidized Amtrak in the 1970s.

Since the early 20th century, which saw an escalating migration of African-Americans from the Deep South to Chicago — much of it facilitated by cheap train fares — jazz and blues artists have used the “city” to travel to more lucrative performance venues. One recent New Orleans-to-Chicago trip on Amtrak highlighted sites important to blues music.

But it turns out that a folk song, penned in 1970 by Steve Goodman, a native of Chicago’s North Side, cast the biggest influence on the rail line in modern times, serving as a potent advocate.

Goodman’s writing of “City of New Orleans” was inspired by a memorable southbound trip with his wife on the line — and by a sense of alarm about the steady dismantling of passenger rail services across America. (“And the steel rails still ain’t heard the news … This train’s got the disappearing railroad blues.”)

Struggling to secure wide notice for a song that he also performed himself, Goodman cornered Arlo Guthrie one night in a Chicago bar, the Quiet Knight, after a performance by the noted singer and persuaded him to give the ballad a listen. Guthrie ultimately recorded the song, as did a string of others. Goodman died in 1984 at the age of 36, after a long bout with leukemia, and was awarded a posthumous Grammy Award for a Willie Nelson recording of the song.

Goodman’s creation struck a public chord.

Remarkably, it still does.

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    Try as one might, there is no escaping the lingering influence of “City of New Orleans” as the train rolls through parts of five states, with one extended stop in Memphis, home of Beale Street blues clubs and Elvis’ Graceland.

“It never fails, somebody mentions that song,” says Amtrak snack bar attendant Jessica Castile, 46, who recalls hearing the tune on a country music station when she was young in Opelousas, La.

Not long ago, Castile noticed an older gentleman seated next to a young man with a guitar, recalling lyrics as the young player plucked out the song’s notes.

Boarding the train in New Orleans at midday recently, en route to Chicago and a visit with my brother, I’m not looking for talk of the slice-of-Americana music hit from my teen years.

I’d prefer to just take in the changing landscape and listen to random amusing stories of other travelers.

But the train isn’t 30 minutes into its trip, cutting through a patch of cypress swamp at the edge of Lake Pontchartrain, when it happens.

Passenger Delores Johnson, part of an upper-middle-aged group of 10 from Memphis and Nashville, volunteers how the Tennessee contingent passed out copies of the lyrics from “City of New Orleans” during its trip down to New Orleans and belted out their own version of Goodman’s ballad.

“It was fun, oh yes,” she says. “We had the whole car singing. The whole car was very happy.”

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At dinner, I’m seated with a Pentecostal minister from Chicago who, having come to Mississippi for church gatherings, is headed home on the overnight train. He took Amtrak to avoid an endless drive and save money. We trade stories about ourselves and, ever the evangelist, he peppers me with theological questions. You never know where the conversation will go in a bustling dining car.

There is no mention of Goodman’s song. At the 10 p.m. Memphis stop, which will last nearly an hour, the minister bolts off the train.

He isn’t taking advantage of the designated smoke break (“You’ll be able to smoke a whole pack if you want to!” the conductor announces.) Instead, left unsatisfied by a single cheeseburger, the minister heads down the block in search of an open restaurant and a large slice of pie.

A couple from Canada hurriedly leaves the train too, determined to catch a glimpse of the Lorraine Motel — the site of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, now a civil rights museum — a couple of blocks away.

They are seasoned train riders. Later, chatting in the club car, I ask Ron Stang and Gina Lord, both in their 50s, what prompted their trip on this line. Both say they wanted a close look at this slice of the mid-America landscape, adding that they enjoy the odd assortment of people who get on and off. Then Stang, a freelance writer, mentions he has wanted to take this route since college.

“Decades ago, when I was at the university, working on the student newspaper, the guy who edited the paper the year before I did, he and another editor decided they were going to fly to Chicago and take the City of New Orleans,” he says. “Of course, it was right after Arlo Guthrie’s rendition of the ‘City of New Orleans’ became a hit, and so that entered the picture.”

And Stang held on to the idea.

“This is a named train, probably one of the most famous ones — because of the song. And I just like the idea that it has a romantic route between two great cities, between Chicago and New Orleans.”

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Intercom announcements are shut down as the train moves north through the wee hours. The coach car’s quiet is broken only by the occasional jarring cell phone call and one raucous snorer. The A.C. is blowing and it is chilly; those who brought along a blanket are glad they did.

At 1 a.m., passing through a bit of Kentucky, we stop briefly at Fulton, where a trailer serves as the Amtrak depot. It is no match for the restored, grand old train stations in Jackson, Memphis and Chicago.

Early sunlight throws soft shadows across old downtown buildings as we pull into Champaign, Ill., a college town. It is a bustling stop, with more passengers headed for the Chicago metropolis. A short while later, I’m in the dining car, waiting for a table spot. A father can be heard interpreting the passing farm fields, vast, gently rolling, for his young son. This is cornfield territory.

“You know what I don’t see anywhere? I don’t see any cows,” the dad says.

The boy points across the field: “The white house, the one back there, it looks like my Uncle Randy’s. He lives on a farm.”

At breakfast, George Googe, 57, a court public defender from Jackson, Tenn., and his son Charles, 21 are eager to talk. Charles has just graduated from college, a history major preparing to head off to law school, and the two are taking a train journey to celebrate the life transition.

George says that, as the son of railroad employee, he has ridden on the City of New Orleans line for many years, reaching back to the period before Goodman took his memorable ride and jotted down lyrics.

The lawyer believes that a conductor he talked to during that time is the same one mentioned in Goodman’s song (“The conductor sings his song again, the passengers will please refrain …”) He was gregarious, a story-teller.

“The way he talked, he seemed to be somebody that Goodman or anybody would have written about,” the father said.

“It’s a hunch, but it may be correct.”

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Scanning Internet musings about Goodman’s song, one finds a lively debate about which recording is the best. Guthrie’s? Willie Nelson’s? Johnny Cash’s? Or Goodman’s own? But most entries concern the song’s message.

One train aficionado from Florida opines: “A quietly beautiful song about life in America … May the people who strive every few years to have Amtrak dismantled be forced to spend their eternal afterlife listening to this song.”

The writer strikes a shrill note, to be sure. But nearly a day spent on this iconic train (“Don’t you know me, I’m your native son“), watching the passengers and conductors, taking in images of fields and hardscrabble towns, listening to the rapid chatter of Girl Scouts as they write in journals about their travel adventure, gives rise to another reaction: I agree.