Time Index 3:50
Considering how much of the rest of what I saw in that five-minute clip was quite obviously staged with a chartered train on a semi-active railroad, I have to be skeptical about the purported sounds not having been added in at the studio.
This is the railroad seen in that video:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Montana_Rail,_Inc.
The train is real, but the equipment is non-revenue maintenance-of-way flat cars and ballast hoppers. Any engineer would have stopped the train at the first sight of trespassers, and at that speed and short train could stop the train in a few hundred feet. Then they would have taken the trespassers into custody and turned them over to the local sheriffs.
This just happened a few weeks ago over the RR trestle that goes over Lake Lemon, in Brown County Indiana. I have walked this trestle several times and we always put our ear on the track before attempting to walk across this bridge.
All this time, I was thinking that it worked. So, was I right or lucky?
Air is a very poor conductor of sound, as well as being a highly polluted one. By that I mean the air you are using for a medium also contains many other sounds in addition to the approaching train, which drown it out. But track is not carrying any sound waves, except for sounds that are in contact with it, so you’ll either hear a train or nothing through the tracks.
Auto mechanics have learned that a half a broomstick makes a wonderful stethoscope, and can quickly isolate the part of the engine or the attached component that a noise is coming from. For the same reason, the railroad tracks are an amazingly efficient stethoscope for transmitting the sound of a train a great deal better than the sound can pass through the air. If you don’t want to put your ear on the physical track, find a stick you can use for a stethoscope.
I’ve never tested it, but if the tracks did not give a better warning of a train than airborne sound, I’d be very surprised.
Before and after:
I submitted this to the Mythbusters site several years ago. They still haven’t tested it.
When I was a child we used to camp at the beach near some railroad tracks.
Besides flattening pennies and crushing rocks from the road bed into powder we would put our ears to the track right after the train passed* to listen to the rails. The train was probably a mile or so away by the time the rail went quiet.
- yes children you listen to the train leaving not arriving.
but…but…but…do you look for a train FOLLOWING the last one?:eek::eek::eek:
Naw we pretty much knew the schedule AND if it had gotten louder I would have stood up
My last test of this was in roughly 2011. I lived near the tracks, spent much time by them, and remembered my dad telling me that you could listen to the rails squeal to better hear a train than through the air. To add to this reassurance I am in my last year of college and a professor brought this up too, agreeing it was real. I do not know if much has changed in rail/train design, but squealing is a loss of energy.
Anyway, One day I tired it, heard the train coming, I was at the end of a straight away, and I decided to put my ear to the rails and watch it come down the tracks toward me. Not a peep was heard from the rails.
My testing area was New England, on a warm day, clean tracks, solid weld, if this matters.
Would love to know more about this!
I’ll bet it would be even quieter with a modern maglev train.
You’ll never know what hit you.