cleve callison’s blog

I promise this will be my last post about Johnny Mercer — for a while, anyway. The opening lines of his Oscar-winning “On the Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe” offer a nostalgic portrait of steam train whistles:

Do you hear that whistle down the line?
I figure that it’s Engine Number 49.
She’s the only one that’ll sound that way
On the Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe.

He’s right that the sound of a steam whistle was distinctive — but that distinction didn’t depend on the engine. It varied depending on a number of things — steam pressure, ambient temperature and pressure, speed, humidity, and certainly not least, the engineer’s manipulations. Whistles were so much a part of the engineer’s “signature” that senior ones were allowed to take them home and use them only on their runs. So people near the lines knew from the sound, not which engine was coming, but which engineer.

I learned this from a historian I interviewed at WLRH when I did a documentary on steam trains. The switch to diesel meant many things, not least of which was a loss of job skills and status for engineers. A good steam engineer had to know just the right combination of steam, grade, train weight and a host of other things to move the train forward properly. With diesel you simply clicked the throttle into one of eight forward positions. And a diesel horn was simply a compressed air blast. You couldn’t tell from listening who was at the controls. No one doubts the advantages of diesels, of course, but loss of control over how to do your work was keenly felt by engineers.

For all the romance, trains were and are huge pieces of heavy, complex machinery. And they’re dangerous. My great-grandfather Hudson worked for the railroad and was killed on duty. This was of course before the days of pensions and death benefits, so his widow became a pauper. Her children, including my grandmother Eula, were sent to orphanages.