Whistle, stop! Frank McNally on the downside of a great American tradition

I always thought of American train whistles as a romantic sound, like a kind-of mechanised poetry, or a secular version of church bells. But after a week in Berkeley, California, a city where you hear them every minute of the day and night, I may have changed my mind.

The train whistles here do not seem to correspond with the ones immortalised in a thousand blues and country songs. Those always represent freedom, or at least the longing for freedom. At worst, they form the lonesome soundtrack to a situation in which freedom is impossible.

“I love the sound of a whistle/It always takes me where I want to go,” sang Boxcar Willie for the more cheerful tradition. “I’m stuck in Folsom Prison, and time keeps draggin’ on/But that train keeps a rollin’, on down to San Antone,” lamented Johnny Cash, for the less.

In the typical ballad, crucially, trains are few and far between. Also important is that they tend to be heard from a distance, so that even at night, as they mark the slow passing of hours in remote parts of the US, the whistles are muffled.

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As for California, when trains occur there – musically at least – they tend to be leaving it, in a relaxed manner, almost always carrying a failed but philosophical Hollywood actor home to a better life in Georgia (“Woo, Woo!”).

But the American songbook in silent about built-up areas like Berkeley, a university town near San Francisco, where train whistles are a 24-hour backdrop. And even in those Blues songs that use the sound as a metaphor for human misery, nobody mentions the sleep deprivation.

I, by contrast, have the given the subject much thought this past week. While listening to train whistles at 2, 3, and 4am – jetlag also helped with the research – I even found myself wondering if “whistle” is the right word to describe them at all.

The noise sounds more like a badly played harmonica. Or like the sudden expulsion of air from a piano accordion run over by a car.

After a particularly shrill blast one night, the film soundtrack that played out in my mind involved a scene in which an accordion player is assassinated (perhaps by a sensitive fiddle player who had heard one too many music sessions ruined), the instrument’s last gasp substituting for the victim’s.

Speaking of badly played harmonicas, a young Bob Dylan did deal briefly with the issue of trying to sleep near an American railroad station. In his cover of Freight Train Blues, he seems stoical about the effect, noting that freight trains “taught me how to cry”, while “the holler of the driver was my lullaby.”

Boxcar Willie went further, claiming that a train whistle used to “wake me gently every morn [and] put me to sleep at night”.

But back in 2004, the US government officially declared the noise a nuisance and said that henceforth towns across America could vote to ban it. Berkeley was one of the many places to consider a curfew then, before deciding against.

The problem is that train whistles are considered vital to public safety. Even at the time they were declared a nuisance, the trains they warned about were hitting thousands of cars a year. And silencing them in cities, where there are many railway street crossings, is expensive and inconvenient, requiring new and fool-proof gates everywhere.

Of course I accept the need for train whistles where safety dictates. But there have been nights here since I arrived when it sounded like the drivers were in competition to see who could make the biggest racket crossing town. Either that or, having to work all night in a notoriously lonely job, they wanted to keep the rest of us awake too, for company.

I wonder if the age and social profile of municipal decision makers, raised on romantic train songs but now living a comfortable distance from the tracks, could be a factor in continued official tolerance.

On a possibly related note, I see that Van Morrison’s album St Dominic’s Preview has just turned 50. Recorded in San Francisco in 1972, that includes at least one tribute to the lonesome locomotive genre: “And for every cross-cuttin’ country corner/For every Hank Williams railroad train that cried.”

But Van also visited the subject in an earlier song, on Astral Weeks, with the pained mantra: “I think I’ll go walking by the railroad, with my cherry, cherry wine/I believe I’ll go walking by the railroad, with my cherry cherry wine/If I pass the rumbling station, where the lonesome engine drivers pine.”

That was set in Belfast, but soaked in musical Americana. And at 3am the other night, it seemed the perfect expression of the potential of train-whistle-induced insomnia to eventually drive you to drink.