In its personality, The Great Train Robbery is easily one of the composer's most optimistic and light-hearted efforts for a full ensemble, joining in the romp of the story's twists with unquestionably affable characteristics. The instrumentation is geared towards a light atmosphere, with plucked bass strings often dancing underneath high woodwinds, xylophone, violins, and occasional harpsichord. Whether you, as a Goldsmith collector, can find enough merit to appreciate in these airy tones apart from their necessary application in the film is another matter. Goldsmith uses the meter of a waltz in the polar opposite fashion as he had the previous year in The Boys from Brazil, this time taking the period-appropriate rhythms and accelerating them under an exuberant major-key theme. This idea receives boisterous, full-ensemble treatment in the opening and closing title cues, informing the remainder of the score with almost perpetual development of either the idea's progressions or its underlying rhythms. A three-note motif that opens the rhythmic figures beneath the thematic performances is a good tool with which to provide a quick moment of suspense while characters are sneaking about on screen. A secondary offshoot of the main theme heard at roughly 0:40 into the "Main Title" as occasionally thereafter is a little more devious in its interpretation of the same theme, yielding comparisons to Goldsmith's later Under Fire, albeit with a much brighter attitude. He doesn't take much time to explore supplemental material in The Great Train Robbery, instead content to allow his primary idea to effortlessly carry the likable story through its delightful twists. The romantic passages of character interaction lightly touch upon the main phrasing of the primary theme in softer shades, failing to explore anything new. Not only is there a relative absence of significant depth to both the composition and the performance (there are occasionally moments when Goldsmith stacks lines in the complex fashion you hear in many of his other scores, but such complications go against the spirit of the score), it's a rather short work overall, Goldsmith's contribution substantially limited to the major expositions of the title theme in the final cut of the film.

One employment of the main theme does stand out in the score for The Great Train Robbery; in the short "Departure," a cue alternately titled "The Gold Departs," Goldsmith increases the pace and corresponding level of excitement in the ensemble as the steam locomotive gets its start; it's not a terribly original idea but an effective one nonetheless. On the whole, The Great Train Robbery is as engaging as it is trite, accomplishing all of its goals but potentially opening the doors for a headache in listeners who can't tolerate hopelessly optimistic comedy for long periods. Fortunately for these souls, there is little instrumentation targeting the era of the story, as the production mostly took a modern look at the historical events. On album, the meat of the score was only available on a rare 1990 dual CD (with Goldsmith's The Wild Rovers) for many years. In 2004, Varèse Sarabande remixed more of the music from newly discovered 24-track masters, allowing for not only superb sound quality when heard on regular CD players, but also an SACD presentation for those equipped. Intrada Records issued a more satisfying, 2-CD set of the complete score in 2011, adding mostly source-like material for solo flute and guitar but also a few new suspense cues in the middle passages. That set also includes extensive alternate takes, fifteen minutes of the actual source pieces, and the differing LP presentation on the second CD. Neither the 2004 nor 2011 albums were limited in quantity, but they did eventually go out of print. In 2019, Quartet Records revisited the general idea of the Intrada album but sought to more faithfully recreate the presentation heard within the film (including extensive work on the climactic "The Gold Arrives..." cue) and remaster all material again, including the original LP album, for another 2-CD set, this one limited to 1,000 copies. The prior arrangements of certain tracks as heard on the Intrada set are preserved as alternates on the Quartet product as well. Additional source pieces are also included. The sound quality on any of the later albums is very impressive, but it only magnifies the difficultly that some listeners might have with the extremely positive tone of the score. Goldsmith at his most playful was certainly proficient at his task but also occasionally tiresome, and a little of The Great Train Robbery's slurring trombones goes a long way.  ***   @Amazon.com: CD or Download