I am snuggled up in an apartment in Pennsylvania that overlooks some railroad tracks. Trains come by a couple of times an hour, the noise is sort of in the distance.
**Why is it train noises are pleasant, or at least non-unpleseant? ** Airplane and car noises seem to be stressful, but train noises are sort of neat.
Or is it just me?
I like the beat. If I’m not actually in the drum.
Probably not so unstressful if you live very close to an active line (such as an EL).
The El, in my extremely limited experience, doesn’t make the same ‘chugga chugga’ sound. It’s more or a very fast, short lived, loud WHOOSH sound.
It’s a good question. I think it’s because the sound of the train is consistent and rather unchanging. The “clickity click” of the cars going over the rail ties is a sort of white noise.
I speak from experience. The house I grew up in was very close to tracks. Freight trains would pass through day & night on perfect schedule. You could set your watch to them. In fact (and I’m not kidding) if for some rare reason the 3:30am train did not go through I would wake up.
George Bailey: You know what the three most exciting sounds in the world are?
Uncle Billy: Uh-huh. Breakfast is served; lunch is served, dinner…
George: No, no, no, no! Anchor chains, plane motors and train whistles.
It’s a Wonderful Life (1946)
(Of course, he wasn’t thinking of jet planes.)
Just you. I have a train crossing about 600 meters/yards from my house. I guess on its own, it wouldn’t be so bad. But the train track crosses roads. That means the driver has to blow his horn. There are regulations for when he has to blow his horn, but no regulations prohibiting him from being an exaggerating son-of-a-bitch. And I swear, there’s one ass-wipe on that route that insists on being an exaggerating son-of-a-bitch at 4:00 in the morning certain days of the week. Wakes me up, every time.
I’ve not been home full-time in about a year and a half. I hope he’s retired by time I get home (assuming I don’t get killed by narcos on the way out).
Now to me what’s sort of neat are freighter horns. I mean lake freighters. Like great lake freighters. I grew up about the same 600 meters/yards from Lake Huron. Granted that the freighters aren’t right at the short, but you could hear their horns all the same. To me, hearing a great lakes freighter horn at a distance is the ultimate peace, and sort of neat. To steal from the OP, or is it just me?
Second. The horn is a son of a bitch. I used to live just three or four hundred yards away (with no buildings in between), but now am about 4 blocks further away and another 25 stories up - much, much better.
I lived right next to the Burlington Northern switchyard in Missoula, Mt for a while. It wasn’t near as annoying as living next to a major highway. I think the fact that it was a constant chugga-chugga all time had a lot to do with it. After a short time, you just screened it out. I used to walk across the yard to the Silver Dollar, contemplating what would happen if I threw a switch or two. They didn’t seem to be padlocked.
With the train you know there is no danger; I wonder if that is part of it.
(I once woke in the wee hours with a sound that seemed like an airplane heading straight for our house! A large truck, drunk driven, had flipped out of control, knocked over a tree, and been arrested by a second tree. Fortunate as our house was next up after the second tree. … We soon moved to another home 200 metres back from the road. 
)
Chugga chugga? I didn’t think they ran steam trains anymore.
To me, the low-pitched hum of the engine can be pretty pleasant to the ears. However, the horn is obnoxious. I can’t imagine trying to sleep through that.
The preschool I worked at a few years ago was next-door to a place called The Whistle Stop Cafe because the train tracks were as close to the building as is allowable, probably no more than 300 feet from the back of the building. At that close, train sounds are not not noise.
I hate train noises. They always wake me and are unpleasant. Frogs are soothing in a mind numbing way, until you find a spot where they are so loud they are deafening. It’s all subjective to each person.
I’ve never heard traffic that was loud enough to be annoying.
Trains, on the other hand…
At my last house, the back yard butted up against a train track. ‘Pleasant’ is the very last possible word that I would ever, ever use for the noise the bloody thing made. Watching TV, listening to music, holding a conversation - all of that was quite literally impossible when the damn thing was going by.
I now live within earshot of the same tracks, and it’s far less annoying when it’s not right in the back yard, but I’d still never call it less unpleasant than traffic.
I’ve never not lived within five miles of a train track, and usually within one mile. Summers as a kid the train went right through our field out back. I like the noise, even though it rouses me a bit, it never really wakes me.
For me, low register noises in general are comforting, higher noises tense me up. A jet, for example, has a lot of high pitched noise in it’s sound. There’s a reason why “screaming” comes to mid when we are describing that noise. Large dog barking? I’m warm and safe. Small dog yapping? Where’s my baseball bat?
Well, it seems that the brain can separate sounds out into “foreground” and “background” noises, and the background stuff can be hidden from consciousness. A particularly impressive example is how we can concentrate on one person’s voice among many voices (ok, not perfectly, but it’s a really tough thing to do at any level with software).
So something about train sounds is getting them categorized as ambient or background noise, whereas car noise isn’t.
My simple WAG is that the occasional rushing sound of a distant train is not dissimilar to the wind, something we’re probably hard-wired not to find distracting.
Whereas the tone of a small car passing versus a truck is very different, plus the occasional horn…there’s too much going on there to just file it away as background.
I live in a quiet east Kent town. The trains that pass by (less than 100m away) are gentle quiet background noise every half hour or so. occasionally we get a steam train roaring past and that is immense fun and very romantic.
Imagine my surprise then, waiting at New London Amtrak station for a NY train. A long freight train approaches and I am mildly curious, I knew it was coming of course as I heard his horn coming down the coast. I look around me and notice that others are covering their ears. Strange, it isn’t cold. The rumbling train is only about 20 yards away but it isn’t particularly loud.
Then I look up the track to the road crossing and slightly too late I realise the bastard is going to sound his horn. BLLLLLLLLLAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRGGGGGGGHHHHHH!!!
SHIIIIIIIIIIIITTTTTTTTTTTTTT!..Laptop bag and suitcase both get dropped as I try to save my precious eardrums.
Bloody hell, they are loud.
I hate fuckin’ trains, especially their damn whistles, those are the worst part of it! My lady friend used to live within 50 yards of one, and there were days she would dream of owning a rocket launcher. I live about a third of a mile from the same track, and know the feelin’.
I can deal with slow moving trains, especially when they lay off the whistle. But mile long trains going 50-65 mph, and blowing that damn whistle 4-6 times at the intersection of where I’m near, when the wind is out of that direction too, well, it tends to make me neurotic as hell, especially when they come through several times in an hour, every hour, and at night too.
This calls for a trip down Straight Dope memory lane. From Cecil’s July 4, 1986 column:
So it looks like you missed out on an opportunity for lots of fun and excitement. Although maybe there’s a overhead crane nearby…
I used to live around 50m from a train line that would be used four times an hour between 6am and 11pm (or there abouts). It was at the back of the garden and elevated above the roof of our single-story dwelling but, even so, if we were in the garden and a train rolled by we’d automatically stop talking in mid-conversation until the noise had reduced significantly enough to resume. Something like;
“What’s for dinner?”
"Um , we should probably …
"clippitty clippitty clippitty clippitty clippitty clippitty clippitty clippitty clippitty clippitty clippitty clippitty clippitty CLIPPITTY CLIPPITTY CLIPPITTY CLIPPITTY CLIPPITTY CLIPPITTY CLIPPITTY clippitty clippitty clippitty clippitty clippitty clippitty clippitty clippitty clippitty clippitty clippitty clippitty clippitty clippitty
“…have a look in the freezer. What do you fancy?”
“How about steak and kidney pie?”
“Sounds good!”
When we came to sell the house we didn’t even realise some people might not like having a train line so close. It was closer than the train line at the back of our previous house, and louder as the newer trains are lighter and bounce around more, but we still just saw it as a minor inconvenience.
I love train journeys; the longer the better. I’ve taken many journeys on sleeper trains in SE Asia and always slept like a baby. Helicopters really bug me, though.