I’m watching the Sox-Mariners game at Safeco tonight, and every few minutes I hear some freaking train whistle. I Google Mapped and I see what looks like a freight yard right there near the park, but no tracks.
What gives? Where’s the choo choo?
ETA: Never mind. I found it.
Is this a record for questions answered in GQ?
It never got out of the OP and it was answered.
What is the answer?
the tracks run right behind the stadium, when the roof is open it is actually OVER some of the tracks
At Google Maps, you can see that several sets of tracks run under the opened roof, just east of the diamond. The white-roofed cars just south of the field are all Amtrak trains. I think Burlington Northern runs the freight operation.
When the All-Star game was played in Seattle (2001?), the MLB poobahs tried to get the trains silenced when passing the stadium (the idea being that the train whistles would somehow detract from the game). They were more-or-less politely told to stuff it: not only are the whistles part of the Safeco ambiance, but doing so would have forced BN to shut down its main north-south line for the duration, since the tracks cross several arterials in the vicinity and it would have been far too dangerous to run the trains silently — and no way was BN gonna do that, not even to appease the MLB gods.
I did that at first, they’re much easier to pick out in the map view than in the satellite.
Five times a game? Sounds about right. I recall a drinking ritual back in Kingdome days based on the train horns.
The real answer is that the tracks are situated directly under the spot where they roll the convertible roof to on nice days (just over the right field wall), which occasionally provides the perfect opportunity for the roof to catch an enormous choking cloud of train exhaust and waft it directly into the stadium. It’s just not a Mariner’s game without garlic fries and diesel exhaust. 
In the picture currently on the google maps satellite view, you can see that the roof is in its parking spot covering the tracks. In bad weather, the roof is over the stadium and the tracks are not covered.