Hello, this is my first post. I'm a historian and I'm doing some research into the history of American music. There are so many songs about trains, and songs that incorporate trains sounds. I've been wondering if the sound of steam locomotives changes significantly in the early twentieth century.

i know that superheating had become common by the 1920s, and with it piston valves in place of slide valves. Did a superheated locomotive with piston valves sound noticeably different from a loco with saturated steam and slide valves?

Thank you for any help answering this question

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Especially at low speeds or at starting, yes.....once everything got hot and at track speed, much less so. Superheated locomotives didn't have as soggy an exhaust sound under those circumstances - "crisp" is a term I've seen applied.

Front end arrangements also make a difference - I was told the sounds of Jupiter and 119 (replicas) were very different due to the spark arreestors and funnel stack on Jupiter producing a muffled beat rather than a clean beat as 119 did with a Master Mechanic's front end and straight stack.

At high speed, the sound is a roar and whoosh. Shays, of course sound like a rod engine at high speed when travelling at walking speed.

There are recordings of varying kinds of steam operating under different circumstances you can listen to to get an idea better than descriptions can provide.

dave

We should also mention air pumps. Cross compound pumps have a signature double beat, chunk-chunk... chunk-chunk... as the exhausting of the high pressure steam cylinder fills the low pressure cylinder. Cross compound pumps date to what, 1910 or so? However, single air pumps (the original type) remained in service until the end of steam, on some engines on some roads. And, there were engines that had two of either style.

Oh, and the whistle of the turbo generator is missing from the early engines that had oil lamps.

Thank you, that makes sense. And I suppose by the time you have superheaters in general you have dramatically shorter stacks, which ought to change the sound a lot.

I live near Washington DC--if I drove up to East Broad Top, would I be able to hear a "modern" locomotive and a saturated steam loco?

Strasburg is about as close and runs several diverse locomotives each day - not sure what is in the current lineup, but probably somebody can chime in here with good information.

dave

I would suggest going to Western Maryland Scenic and East Broad Top to hear the difference on a grander scale. You'll hear superheated steam working hard on a grade on a "long" run, and a small engine rolling along the EBT. There's also a big difference in the weight of the cars and the size rail on the track. At the EBT you'll hear something closer to a typical short line or branch line poking along with the lighter wooden cars, but at WMSR you've got some much heavier equipment moving faster and on larger rail. The newer stuff also has generators under the cars for lights and A/C.

One thing I have always enjoyed is hearing the different whistles from different railroads. N&W had a signature single note whistle on a lot of it's power, while the Pennsylvania had a much shriller "Banshee" single note and a very pretty 3 chime. Go out west and the Southern Pacific had deep sounding 6 chimes while the Rio Grande had the best sounding mournful (my opinion) 5 chimes you could hear.

The absolute best recommendation I can make: Go seek out audio recordings (or videos with sound) of the East Broad Top's Mikados. 12, 14, and 15 are saturated steam; 16-18 (of which only 17 has operated since 1956, last seeing steam in Oct. 2001) are superheated. You will thus, provided you fond the audio, be able to compare side by side the same loco type on the same railroad in the same conditions, with the only difference being the saturated-vs.-superheat. That, as a rule, is pretty tough to do.

My recollection matches that of Kelly and Dave: Perhaps a better way to describe the syndrome is that the saturated steamer sounds perhaps "asthmatic" or "wheezy" compared to the sharper bark or 'crack" of the superheat. Again, this is most prominent in drifting or lower power; work 'em hard and you'll still go deaf.

One other thing he could do is go talk to the guys at the local live steam club. I realize it is not as good as the real thing, but you can hear the difference even in small scale side by side. At the Club I'm involved with, I sometimes drive another member's Wabash mogul which has slide valves and isn't superheater. It makes a much different (less pronounced and more wheezy) than another member's PS-4 which makes nice sharp exhaust cracks especially when pulling a fully loaded train on the small grade. Again, I realize it isn't quite as good as having the real thing, but I think you would have a much better shot of comparing differently equipped locomotives side by side.

The sound of steam! That was always one of the most endearing traits of the beast, and one of the things that made steam locomotives seem like living things.

As noted, exhausts told a knowledgeable listener all kinds of things. They could tell you about hook up and valve setting, they could tell you if the engine was superheated or saturated, they could tell you they were working or running or taking it easy, they could tell you if the water was too high in the boiler just before the water came out the stack--old timers like Bill Purdie and Billy Byrd would tell you a steamer talked all the time, and would tell you all sorts of things if you knew how to listen. . .not only to the exhaust but to rod bearings and boiler sounds. . .

I mentioned valve setting a moment ago. You don't hear too much of this today, as many restored locomotives are often in better condition than they were in service, but how many here can recall how an engine might sound "out of square," with uneven exhaust beats? O. Winston Link caught this on a couple of his records, one being with a Y-6 pusher (from "Thunder on Blue Ridge"), and the other with the little 382, a saturated 4-8-0 on the West Jefferson mixed train (from "The Fading Giant"). The latter was after the train had stopped at Green Cove, where there was a little level spot at the station, but the grade started up again right out of the siding. The engineer actually takes slack with his 6-car train to get as good a start as he can for the pull that begins just yards ahead, and the engine accelerates briskly with a hissing safety valve for a few hundred feet, but slows down and labors as it works up the grade, its uneven exhaust telling the source of the child's story of "The Little Engine That Could," its exhaust speaking, "I think I can, I think I can"--yes, they really can sound like that!

I can recall riding what is now the Western Maryland Scenic when Jack Showalter had a contract to operate the line, and noting how that little CP G-5 4-6-2 (with only about 35,000 lbs. tractive effort) worked hard going up the hill to Number Nine--and then worked her heart out all the more as the grade steepened to 3% for the last three miles to Frostburg. No. 734 does the same thing today, but the effect is muted by those !!@#$%&!! air-conditioned cars! Bah! Proper cars for a steam railroad should have clerestory roofs, plenty of rivets, ideally six-wheel trucks, and windows that open to let in the sound--even if they also let in all that smoke and those cinders, too.

Like so many other things, railroads would insist on customizing things like whistles. As noted, the Pennsy used a "banshee" for freight engines that sounded more like a European peanut whistle than anything else--but on steroids! EBT's 17 sounds something like that. The PRR had a nice, mellow chime for passenger engines.

This practice of different whistles for passenger and freight locomotives was also used on the Norfolk & Western. Passenger locomotives used a deep chime whistle that sounded like something off a river steamer; freight power used a single-note "hooter" that in all honesty was just a noisemaker, indeed I understand that the specification for them was to be made from a piece of boiler tube, yet they had this wonderful, haunting, mournful quality that sounded so at home in the coal country. I can imagine nothing else on an A or a Y on that road.

Mallet-type locomotives are interesting. Four-cylinder simples sound like doubleheaded engines, with two sets of exhausts that go into and out of step, like a pair of carpenters with hammers. True Mallet compounds have a tremendous double exhaust as they start in simple, then roar like anything as they transition to compound, then suddenly settle down to a somewhat mushy two-cylinder sound as they go fully into compound with the only sound being the low-pressure exhaust.

Doggone it, this has got me going to that addictive YouTube site--got to get some noise around here. . .

Just a sampling of a some favorites, both in image and sound. . .

We open with Cass Scenic No. 5 on a log train, with a wonderful whistle that is, from the comments there, a 5" Lunkenheimer 3-chime that is owned by Cass engineer Artie Barkley.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=89TfUia3CLk

Whistles get moved around at Cass on occasion, and a different on is on No. 5 here as it assists the big WM 6 on the train to Bald Knob. Favorite section of this for me is the restart on an 8% grade from the water tank at Oak Run. As near as I can determine, the engineer on the road engine (No. 6) whistles off, the engineer on No. 5 acknowledges this, then both engineers open their throttles to charge the cylinders before releasing the brakes. The first exhaust out of No. 6 sounds like a shotgun, and it almost looks like the car just ahead of the locomotive jumps a bit from the shock of the initial shove--and then the train just walks up the 8% grade, just everyday work on this railroad.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NDJkzW7ligQ

Change of pace--UP 844 at speed, with short cut-off and light throttle, and a clean fire; she's working so easy that the dominant sound is that of her rod bearings. And she's a happy locomotive, look how she wags her tender in a couple of spots, one of them being at about 5:35. . .:-)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fl736E_VnB4&feature=fvst

East Broad Top coal train, saturated engine, pretty whistle, and just a hint of being a little out of square:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UFC_9szfA5c

The little jewel that is the Eureka; saturated engine, wood-fired:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ferhyc25 ... re=related

N&W 1218 demonstrates the in-step, out-of-step double-beat of a superheated simple articulated starting at 3:10:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=so7-Fu2psjc

O. Winston Link audio clip of an N&W J (despite the comments on the link, I think it may have actually been the 604 rather than fan tripper 611), complete run from Keystone to North Fork on the Cavalier. On this segment, the Cavalier handled a lot of local work, and in this sequence the stops are less than two miles apart. Engine is large and superheated, works hard at starting but with a 35-mph speed limit takes it easy once up to speed; second start sequence at North Fork features the exhaust echoing off trackside buildings. One of the most interesting things about this sound clip is the deep whistle that sounds alive, somehow like a dinosaur to my mind.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0YemLxH5 ... re=related

Audio track from Semaphore Records, featuring a PRR I-1 with a banshee whistle and a bit of rod noise.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7IlikiNSu9k

PRR M-1, also from Semaphore, featuring the passenger whistle, a slightly out-of-square exhaust, rod noise, and a nice short cut-off as the engine makes easy work of its freight train.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z7b9iNTQ ... re=related

We railfans get no respect. Everyone thinks we are crazy, or that we are kids who never got over our toy trains. What they don't know. . .

I would agree that any geared steam locomotive sounds like it's sprinting while walking, having seen the climax at Clarks Trading post (it doesn't look to bad. The russian iron-style paint looks good. Thank lord all they did was paint!). What did confuse me is how the climax had a slight bark (at least that's what I thought) to the exhaust. It being saturated, that's what I'd expect from a steam engine. Then there's the Crown steamer at Canobie Lake Park. That one just wooshes; only thing you hear is the hissing steam and clanking side rods.

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Some more different exhaust sounds. From across the pond, Great Western King Edward 1 # 6024 in first two clips, you can hear the syncopated exhaust with 4 beats per revolution from a 4 cylinder engine. The "rolling" exhaust note is due to the different lengths of the exhaust pipes as the outside cylinders are farther aft than the inside ones. In third clip of LMS Princess Elizabeth # 6201 you can hear the pressure change on the fireside as the fire gets draft on it from the throttle being opened.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bQf0ilZSXp0&feature=related

Thank you all VERY much. What I'm especially interested in is the relationship between the musical beat known as the "shuffle" and the sound of a steam locomotive. Everybody knows songs, in all genres, country, blues, and jazz--where the instruments imitate a trains. But in the 1920s, the "swing" feel develops. I made a blog post about it:

http://theaporetic.com/?p=2388

I'm wondering if musicians were inspired to invent the "swing" feel by the sound of locomotives. In the 20s, as I understand it, superheating and piston vales and shorter stacks became the norm, and I'm wondering if a difference of sound might have inspired. it. Musicians clearly heard a similarity.

I was going to say no as all its mechanics is before the throttle, but superheated steam is an effort to get more power from the steam, so on exhaust it may be less liquidy, so yeah, it might effect the exhaust sound.