The Curious Incident of the Train Whistle in the Night

You'd think that, in this age of standardization, some corporate mandate would have set a uniform pattern for train whistles, and yet I hear them vary.

Most often I hear long-long-short-long, but I've also heard, for example, in just the last couple of weeks: long-short-long; a lone long from some lazy guy; short-short-short; and even short-short-short-short, which sounded positively playful. Westbound trains usually begin whistling east of my house, give a loud blast as they draw even with my house, and then continue blasting as they move on westward, so I hear the additional variation of the Doppler effect.

But once I heard a variation that made me think bad news.

This was a few years ago (and with my defective memory, a "few years" could be anywhere from two to ten), on an evening when I was so tired that I fell into bed early and starting drifting off to sleep. I had been living here long enough that trains passing on summer nights no longer jerked me awake in a panic; and the first blast of this train's whistle just half-registered in my sleepy brain. A standard long, a pause — then an insistent lo-o-o-o-o-o-o-ng that didn't let up as the train passed by my house, down the remaining hundreds yards and through the Ainsworth crossing. And then the whistle gave way to the screech and wail of a fast train coming to a hard stop.

"Something ain't right," I thought, but I hadn't heard the kind of loud crash you might expect from an accident, so I stayed in bed and tried to go back to sleep.

Then I heard the sirens.

I got out of bed and looked out the front door. There was the freight train, blocking the Ainsworth crossing; there were police cars, blue lights flashing; there were police officers milling around, and an ambulance pulling up, but I still couldn't see what, if anything, the train had hit.

I kept watching, out of natural if morbid curiosity. After a while the ambulance departed leisurely. Then a tow truck came, backed onto the right-of-way west of the Ainsworth crossing, and pulled out what remained of a black car.

Whoever left it on the tracks apparently got out before the train hit. That was lucky. I know of two people killed in train-car accidents along the Ainsworth part of the Grand Trunk.

To this day you can still find parts of that black car where the train left them.


Maya investigates the crash scene:

(Click on images to enlarge)

It was a GM:


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On the topic of lucky accidents, this just in from The Vidette-Messenger (Valparaiso, Ind.), Tuesday, March 10, 1931:

Seven Grand Trunk trainmen escaped injury Monday afternoon when the caboose in which they were riding overturned between Sedley and Ainsworth. Two work cars toppled over. It took the wrecking crew until 7 o'clock this morning to "right things." The train was backing from Ainsworth to the Deep River bridge, unloading ties, when it struck a giant snow drift and overturned, pulling the other cars with it. No one was injured.

There had been a big March snowstorm, I gather. Something like the one in March of 1998, when I spent a week without power, which out here also means without running water, but that's another story.