Almost all of my friends know that I am a pushover when it comes to trains. They also know that I am a pushover when it comes to folk songs. When those two are wed together, I am largely a basket case. That is what happens when it comes to whistles on trains, but there is much more, involving whistles used by the human species on this earth.
To get back to my love of trains and folk music, sometimes I go around with a folk song throbbing in my head. That song is “Five Hundred Miles from Home.” The first verse goes like this:

If you miss the train I’m on, you will know that I am gone
You can hear the whistle blow a hundred miles,
A hundred miles, a hundred miles, a hundred miles, a hundred miles,
You can hear the whistle blow a hundred miles.
-Traditional Folk Song

When I hear a train whistle blow, I cannot help but feel a sense of solitude and longing. When I was aboard troop trains during World War II, those lonesome whistles reminded me that I was a lot longer than 500 miles from my home. My home was not a castle by any stretch of the imagination. During the great American Depression, the St. Louis County National Bank did not foreclose on the Carr home, simply because it had so many other foreclosed properties on its hands. Yet it was home to me and those lonesome whistles on troop trains reminded all of us that it might be a long time before we saw our homes again.
In my mind, there are few more impressive sights than to see a steam engine pass on the rails while sounding its whistle. The ground shakes, sparks and cinders fly in the air, and if the engineer or the fireman were to wave at a little boy, it would fill his heart with joy. Even today, for a man in his eighties, the sound of a train whistle brings back poignant memories. Song writers almost always refer to train whistles as “lonesome.” I am unable to argue with that nomenclature. Train whistles which operate on steam are indeed lonesome and while they do not carry for a hundred miles as the song says, they travel a great distance. It always seemed to me that those train whistles traveled further at night than they did during the daylight hours. But no matter how you cut it, the train whistle is a compelling sound that calls forth memories of lonesomeness and being away from home.
My father worked for the Illinois Central Railroad for a time around the turn of the 19th to the 20th century. We had a windup Victrola in our living room and one way or another before I was born, my father bought phonograph records of famous train wrecks. Today I have in my possession such songs as “The Wreck of the Old 98,” “The Wreck of the Old 37,” and “The Wreck of the Shenandoah Express.” A well-known singer at the time, Vernon Dalhart, sang those songs and in nearly every one of those cases, the engineer could see doom ahead. He could see a split rail or he could see another engine on the same track heading toward him. On more than half of those records, the lyricist says that “his whistle broke into a scream,” and he was found in the wreckage “with his hand on the throttle and was scalded to death by the steam.” That is pretty macabre stuff, but men who drove steam engines took their lives in their hands every day. And when they had a wreck, Mr. Dalhart would enjoy a comfortable income from the phonograph record that he would make of that event.
Well, so much for whistles on trains for the time being. Boats have whistles too. On the troop ship that took us from Charleston, South Carolina to Dakar, Senegal there was a steam whistle that could be heard for miles around. When we pulled into the port at Dakar, the captain of the troop ship, which was the Santa Maria, named after one of the three ships used by Christopher Columbus, sounded his whistle repeatedly. The net effect was that every spy in Dakar came running to the port to watch us disembark and to try to question us as to where we had come from. We were told that where we had departed from was a military secret. I must have had five or six potential spies querying me about where we had come from in French, broken English, and fluent Arabic. I told them all that I didn’t know where we had come from. That is not a responsive answer, but it got the job done.
Whistles on boats and trains are not the only devices of that sort in existence. Doorkeepers at hotels and fancy apartment buildings also have a whistle which they blow to summon cabs. Those doormen are usually dressed in admirals’ uniforms and make a great production out of summoning the cab, opening the door, and reaching for a tip. It is a ballet-like performance.
Speaking of ballet performances, there are several towns that have policemen who work at intersections and seem to never remove the whistle from their mouths. In the town we live in now, Millburn, New Jersey, there was a policeman who directed traffic at Main Street and Millburn Avenue who was a thorough joy to watch. When he blew his whistle and told someone to make a left turn, he brought his arm up all the way from his knees and pointed at the driver. Literally, there were people who stood on street corners just to watch the performance of this cop. When he retired, he made a living for a while directing traffic at weddings and bar mitzvahs. The sponsors of those events made it clear that the whistle-blowing cop would be on hand, which would ensure a greater attendance at the function. I must say that watching this particular policeman pleased me much greater than any ballet performance I have ever seen.
Now we go back to whistles that are blown by steam. As recently as the 1950s, factories had water towers upon which were mounted whistles usually run by steam. The whistle blew at eight o’clock in the morning and again at twelve noon to mark the starting time and the lunch time. It blew again at 12:30 or thereabouts to summon the men back to work. At the close of the day the whistle blew to sound “quitting time.” For a period in the late 1920s, my father worked at a factory that manufactured bricks to line kilns. If the wind was blowing in the right direction, I could hear the quitting time whistle blow and I would know that after a time my father would make an appearance at our house. If three or four industrial organizations were gathered close together, there was no synchronization of their whistles. One factory might sound its whistle at 7:59 AM while the other would sound its whistle at 8:03 AM. The men who blew those whistles didn’t use a Swiss watch maker. They looked at their pocket watches – no wrist watches need apply – and blew their whistle when their watch said it was time to go to work or time to quit. Where there were three or four or five industrial organizations in close proximity, there was a cacophony of sounds at eight o’clock in the morning and four thirty or five o’clock in the evening as each signaled the start of the day as well as the time to go home. Those were welcome noises which are gone now. I regret that they are no longer part of the American manufacturing scene.
As many of you know, I am a native of St. Louis. When I lived there,St. Louis was widely known as a shoe manufacturing capitol and for its beer bottling industry. Also there were the St. Louis Browns, an American League baseball team which had very little success. As Saint Louisians would say, “First in booze, first in shoes, and last in the American League.” The Budweiser plant still operates in St. Louis so I suppose that it is still among the leading producers of beer. The shoe business is long gone as are the St. Louis Browns who departed in 1953 to become the Baltimore Orioles. I have never forgiven Phil Ball for selling that team to the interlopers from Chesapeake Bay.
For two years in the late 1940s, I lived at 2916A Wyoming Avenue in South St. Louis. The “A” in that address indicates that we lived upstairs in a two-family flat. Within walking distance of our flat, there was the plant of the Alpen Brau Brewery. A few blocks away there was the home of the Griesedeick Brothers Brewery. A block or two down the street was the home of Falstaff Breweries, known as the “King of Beers.” The smell of yeast was in the air at all times and I must say it was a pleasant odor. Each one of those three breweries, which accounted for St. Louis being “first in booze,” kept time with their whistles that were mounted on their water towers. As far as I know, those whistles were operated by steam. How they got the steam up to the level of the whistles is something I do not now know anything about. Simply take it from me that they were operated by steam. Once again, there was no such thing as setting your watch by the whistle at one brewery as distinguished from the other two. Perhaps the fellow who blew the whistles had had a beer or two to drink before he remembered that he needed to pull the whistle cord to get the men started or to tell them that it was quitting time. In any case, on days when I was at home it was a pleasure to hear the whistles sound around 5 PM telling the men it was “quitting time” and time for a beer or two. As I look back upon my time in South St. Louis, those whistles and the yeast at the brewery plants provide me with an advanced stage of nostalgia. Those were pretty good times.
Aside from the whistles that come from mechanical devices on trains, ships, and factory water towers, there are whistles that can be made without an instrument hanging from your mouth. As hard as I would try, I never was able to put my two little fingers in my mouth and sound a shrill whistle which could be heard a block or two away. I tried on several occasions but it was a complete disaster. On the other hand, because I have a space between my two front teeth, I can whistle softly. On one occasion, at a conference in Kansas City, during a break, I was standing looking out the window and absent-mindedly I whistled a tune called “Tenderly.” That song was new at the time and I thought it was a fairly riveting piece of music. A woman from Chicago walked up behind me, put one of her hands on my shoulder, and asked me if I could whistle that song again. She was Rosalie Larson. I obliged that request but let matters rest right where they were. But I didn’t whistle much after that.
The post office in our town is located directly across the street from the railroad station. Ordinarily, trains using that commuter passenger line merely ring their bells as they enter and leave the station. Yesterday, I was startled to hear one of the electric engines let out an enormous roar with his whistle. It startled me. When I began to think about that particular whistle, it occurred to me that trains in this country have whistles in the base baritone range. In Europe, the trains have whistles that utter sounds in the tenor, alto, and soprano ranges. European and Japanese trains operate on narrow gauge railways, but I doubt that this accounts for the difference in the sound. But it makes no difference whether it is an American train or a foreign train, when the whistle blows, there is a sense of lonesomeness which I suppose has always been the case.
Well this is my story on a January afternoon about whistles. I have made no attempt whatsoever to research this project and turn it into a learned treatise. I have always liked whistles as well as I have liked trains as well as I have liked folk music. And so when I hear someone sing, “A hundred miles, a hundred miles, I can hear that whistle blow a hundred miles,” maybe it isn’t a hundred miles but who is to quibble. Whistles are pleasant and they come with a full-blown case of nostalgia. Now who can do anything better than that?
E. E. CARR
January 22, 2007
Essay 228
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Kevin’s commentary: Probably my most common whistle-based interaction these days has to do with a train crossing in San Mateo. This particular train always seems to sound its full whistle/horn combo precisely when the engine has positioned itself right next to me.
You can read more on trains and wrecks here.