We were serenaded during the night by the almost constant hooting of our locomotive’s horn. This was not the harsh, steam-powered whistle of a steam engine but a low, sonorous, evocative, multi-noted tone that will be familiar to anybody who has been to the States. But why do they hoot so often? The answer is that the law obliges trains to hoot for fifteen to twenty seconds before any level crossing and on the particular stretch of line that we travelled last night there are an awful lot of level crossings. I had hoped to provide a link here to a newspaper article, unfortunately lost, that I read earlier during this trip about some poor town somewhere in middle America that is a junction town and has several important freight lines running through it. Local residents are campaigning for the fifteen to twenty second law to be changed because there are nights when they simply cannot get to sleep because so much hooting is going on…
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