I used to get calls like this all the time. Often by the time they reached my phone in the public relations departgment they were really hot. Simply picking up and talking to them usually cooled them down. If they left a message I would call them back, much to their surprise.

Many many people claimed it was the same engineer every night at the same hour. That always gave me chuckle. And a lot of people swore that offending engineers played tunes on the horn, usually "Shave and a Haircut, Six Bits". I never argued with them.

And as noted above many folks believed engineers did it with the idea that since they had to be up at some god awful hour, they didn't anyone else to sleep either. One time I had a guy out in California leave a message on my office nearly nearly every night for about two weeks where he would hold up his phone and let me hear the horn going by his house. He gave up after a while. I never did get to talk to him "live".

Once my wife and I were touring new homes down the street from our house here in Omaha and I asked the sales rep about the tracks out behind the deck. He assured me noise wouldn't be a problem. A few months later I received a call from a lady who bought one of those houses. She said the real estate agent told her the tracks would soon be abandoned. I explained that those tracks were our east-west main line correcting that assumption and she said, "I don't really mind the noise but I didn't expect an earthquake with each train! Oh well, I guess I'll have to sell."

Personally I like to hear the trains and always said, "There goes another paycheck". It's when the railroad would be quiet too long that I worried...



John Bromley
Omaha, Nebraska