Recordings
The next best thing to being able to watch a train in real life is to capture it in pictures or, even better, on tape. I'm certainly not alone among railfans in enjoying engine and horn sounds, and to let other people hear them without waiting for such a train to come is the main reason for uploading over a hundred of these recordings. The first ones were made in May 2000.
A few older recordings (from before August 2000) are at 11025 Hz resulting in less clear sound, and a very few, all from before June 2000, are lower-quality sound without good bass tones. The changes are from recording evolutions early on. A different tape recorder was used for the European trains. Starting in 2011, all recordings are made with a Roland R-05 digital recorder instead of on tape, creating a superior stereo sound.
Updates
New recordings online! After several years of very sporadic additions, I've added a bunch of recordings made in June and July 2011. More are waiting to be uploaded as the new digital recorder has started a recording renaissance of sorts.
Recording Search
Select search criteria below.
Search Criteria
North American Trains
The following are older pages that will be removed once these recordings are added to the database search.Acadian Railway
Acadian Locomotives (4 recordings)
Canadian National
CN Locomotives (3 recordings)
Montreal, Maine & Atlantic/Iron Roads
CDAC
Locomotives (1 recording)
MMA
Locomotives (9 recordings)
Other Information
European Trains
France
SNCF Trains (17 recordings)
Recording Equipment
2000-2010: Analog
I started recording trains with an old Radiola N2234 tape recorder. The recording quality was pretty good for a 30 year-old recorder with a built-in mono condenser mic. On a summer 2002 trip to Europe, I bought a Sony Cassette-corder TCM-939 to record the trains there. While at first the sound quality seemed adequate, I later found it to be much inferior to that of the Radiola recorder when the two were compared. The Radiola recorder was subsequently used for all analog recordings.
2011: Digital
Similarly to what happened when I bought a digital camera in 2007, I eventually gave in and converted to digital for the recordings—without looking back. In May 2011, after three years of only sporadic recordings, I purchased a Roland R-05 digital audio recorder. This allowed me to finally create high-quality stereo recordings directly in a digital format.
Post-processing
Once the recordings are transferred to the computer (whether analog or digital), I edit them using a program called Audacity to remove imperfections, improve sound balance and eliminate volume fluctuations.