Pop Goes the Diesel (song)

For other uses, see Pop Goes the Diesel (disambiguation).

Pop Goes the Diesel is a song featured in The Railway Series story of the same name. It is sung by the trucks after Diesel's embarrassment of failing to pull away some old trucks.

The song was used in the Thomas the Tank Engine & Friends adaptions of the episode of the same name and "Dirty Work", following the same premise.

Another version of this song was included in the Thomas & Friends album, Nursery Rhymes, performed by Rachael Miller with speaking vocals provided by Rob Rackstraw as Diesel.

Lyrics

Trucks are waiting in the Yard;

Tackling them with ease'll

"Show the world what I can do",

Gaily boasts the Diesel.

In and out he creeps about,

Like a big black weasel.

When he pulls the wrong trucks out –

Pop goes the Diesel!

This song is sung to the tune of "Pop Goes the Weasel". A later song, "Pop Goes Old Ollie", uses the same tune.

The trucks' voices are Junior Campbell and Mike O'Donnell's in high pitch. However, while the trucks' laughing sound effect was provided by both Mike and Junior, their singing voices were only provided by Junior.
- This makes the Troublesome Trucks the first characters to have their voices provided by someone other than the narrator.
In both US narrations of this song, "trucks" is replaced with "cars" by the narrator. However, the original trucks' singing voices by Junior Campbell is left intact, with the term "trucks" being used.
- The song in Ringo Starr's UK narration is reused for the US narration and only the lyrics "Cars" and "cars out" are re-recorded.
In the Romansh, Hungarian, Turkish, Korean, Italian and Cantonese narrations, the song sung by the Troublesome Trucks is still in English, though the JEI TV version Korean dub of the song has subtitles.
The theme of the song is similar to the Nursery Rhymes version of the song.