Friscosteamfan: May I add....Some of us grew up living along the NYC Third Avenue El so we know where you are coming from!
Zeke: Great point, especially if you are living in a New York City thin walls apartment.
Modeling the Baltimore waterfront in HO scale
I have noticed that electrically generated train sounds are MUCH more soothing than the real thing. My wife and I like to drop off to sleep watching old train videos. There is no way she (nor I) would tolerate the real thing.
Jim H
Friscosteamfan wrote:We talk about how loud our toy trians are;but did you ever think about how loud real trains are?Multiply that by 2,3,4,etc.Yeah,trains are loud;real and toy!I grew up real close and personel with a local railyard.
What you say?
laz57
Work with to many loud machines, ears don't work to good.
We got in a computer system at work about 20 years ago in a custom crate. The crates were 4 feet on a side and made of 3/8" plywood. They had a second layer of ripped plywood around the perimeter to stiffen the panels. Since this stuff was going to be tossed, I grabbed it and tried to set up a layout using this for the table "top". I probably messed around with this for an HO layout for about 6 months when I finally realized it wouldn't "fit". The kids were still pretty young and saw my O-27 stuff on a shelf and asked about my running this. I tore off the HO material and set up two loops of O/O-27 in a nested dogbone that wrapped around a 14 foot deep by 10 foot wide "alcove" in the basement in a giant "U". The track was laying right on the plywood and the plywood was bridging 2x4's. The kids had a blast playing with the trains but I didn't realize how loud this set up was until I went upstairs to grab the camera. From two stories up, it sounded like we had the 8th Avenue A train cruising around the basement.
I grew up on a commuter line with the tracks literally across the street. You can feel the rumble of the diesel in your chest and the ground actually trembles when the train rolls by. Modern sound systems are wonderfull but they really can't claim to sound like real trains unless you are listening to the real train from 3/4 mile away
Train noise? You want to talk about train noise?
Here was where I used to live in Indiana; mile long coal trains were almost constant, not to mention the automobiles coming out of the Toyota plant. Needless to say, after awhile you got used to crooked pictures on the wall, and turning up the TV periodically. However, we did learn to sleep through them; a fact that our periodic house guests always found amazing. They'd always greet us in the morning with: "Did you hear those 4 trains that rolled through last night?!" To which we'd reply, "Huh, what trains?"
God bless TCA 05-58541 Benefactor Member of the NRA, Member of the American Legion, Retired Boss Hog of Roseyville , KC&D Qualified
Then, if you wanted a prototypical sounded layout then you should buy fastrack, plenty of sound there.
Grayson
"Lionel trains are the standard of the world" - Jousha Lionel Cowen
ATSJer wrote: Train noise? You want to talk about train noise?
you see the house right next to the tracks? when i was little my grandfather lived in a house like that. And i spet every summer with him, the first feww weeks i noticed them but after a bit i never heard them at night......
zeke wrote:you see the house right next to the tracks? when i was little my grandfather lived in a house like that. And i spet every summer with him, the first feww weeks i noticed them but after a bit i never heard them at night......
Yeah, that house always seemed to be for rent, not sure why.
I am glad that toy trains don't come with the freight car with the high pitched squealing and ringing wheel (hey, a new idea for an add-on sound box car!). Every prototype consist seems to have one of those freight cars - shing, shing, shiiiiiiiiiiinnnnnnnnngggggg.
Chris
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