joegreen wrote:On a good day I can hear a horn 7 or 8 miles in the distance. On a bad day it's half a mile.
TomDiehl wrote:Regardless of what the song says, you can NOT hear the whistle blow 100 miles.
I live in a pretty dense urban New York City neighborhood with lots of hi-rise apartments around, and I can hear the Long Island Railroad's airhorns 1 mile away on their main line.
From the speed of the doppler change, I can usually tell if it's an EMU commuter train versus that of a coach train pulled by a DM30AC dual-mode diesel loco..
Years ago, I used to be able to tell when an LIRR GP38-2 is passing by here at my house one mile away from the main, because in addition to the airhorn you'd hear the LOUD jackhammer bang-bang-bang-bang rumble of its normally-aspirated non-turbocharged engine. The Geep 38's are long gone though. :(
The new DM30ACs are nowhere near as loud as the GP38-2s used to be..
Wind direction is also a significant factor. If the wind is blowing from the east, I can hear the UP whistling in Austin, some 8-10 miles east of where I live. Most days, the wind is from the west, and nary a sound.
Art
Well, the Iowa Northern tracks are about 4 miles from me and if it's a realatively quiet day (not more than 10MPH wind) I can hear the air horns for each crossing that they blow for (3 in town, and one just outside of town). It's not too hard to hear. Heck, one day when they crossed my road (4miles down) the horns were actually almost loud! It was just enough to disrupt a conversation.
Also, if its a quiet day (little or no wind) I can hear the rumbling sound of the moving cars.
At least once in my life I could hear the train "whistle" (isn't it really a series of 5 horns?) for about 350 miles. It was the night my wife and I had a bedroom on Amtrak's The Three Rivers from Akron to Chicago. The sleeper was placed directly behind the locomotives and for the next eight hours we heard the engineer blow the horn for every single grade crossing. By the time we arrived, we not only had missed a night's sleep, she was ready to kill me should I ever suggest Amtrak again. I dreaded the return train trip needlessly; there were some head-end and other cars in front of ours and we had a most pleasant journey.
Living but a few blocks from a busy CSX ex-B&O grade crossing I can attest to the difference atmosphere makes to the distance the horn sound travels. Some nights I hardly hear anything, sometimes in the summer it seems the eastbounds are coming right into my bedroom!
I miss whistles. Nothing stirs, excites, or grabs the attention like an honest-to-God whistle, whether it be on a steam locomotive, an interurban, or, needless to say, a ship. I doubt any poets or writers will ever rhapsodize about a Nathan Chime Horn.
I hear em as far as 3 miles some nights. I know that as long they dont short toot on that main everything is fine. I almost can tell which power is going thru. The Coal screams, Pacer Stacks musical, military just wails and so on.
However the whistle of the EBT pulling in off Mike #17 is in my memory like it was yesterday.
When I used to live in Ravenna, OH for 11 years, the tracks were about two miles away from me (they are now three since I live in Firestone Park, OH). I used to be able to hear alot at Ravenna, even on one of my "family" get togther tapes.
You hear the horn then a bunch of clattering (NS trains go 60 mph through there, CSX goes 45) Usually on NS, you could hear the doppler effect in action, the horn would sound as if it were coming, and then it would kind of make that "narrrrrrwwww" noise, then you would hear it in the distance blowing four miles or so away.
I could tell if it was a Dash 9. CSX, on the other hand was quieter. Only going 45 mph in all, I used to hear the SD40-2's, that were loud, like a church organ, and even the GE Wide and Narrow Noses, that sound sort of quiet.
Sometimes on REALLY quiet days, I would hear a slight "ding-ding-ding-ding....." of the crossing gates lowering in the distance at Diamond St. (2 miles away) in Ravenna, OH.
I could tell what type of load it was, because the coal trains would go "bang bang bang bang........" the intermodal's would create a sort of swooshing sound and the manifest would just be clattering. The nightly Amtrak, well, for starters, I could tell the P42's horn anywhere. It sounds kind of high pitch.
But it used to go 69 mph through Ravenna, and you would hear it just toot, it never blew longs. The doppler effect could be heard by those two, and the passenger cars and roadrailers sound the same, they make a rattling noise.
Rich
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The closest I get to any rail line from my home is NS's Michigan Line, approximately 12 miles due north, milepost 67.5, at a spot known as Leoni, Michigan. Many evenings (or mornings), I can hear the whistles between Grass Lake (mp 65) and CP East Jackson (mp 72.7), roughly in a 12-15 mile arc from my house.
Ian