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 110 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; the quality and volume of any after August 2000 is consistent. A different tape recorder was used for the European trains.Recording Search
Recording Search2010-04-01 update: It's been a year and a half since I started updating the Recordings pages, and I'm now finally getting around to finishing them!
In late 2008, I had partly completed an update where I was manually arranging the recordings into tables in HTML pages. I'm abandoning this in favour of storing the recording information in a database, with a search feature to display the recordings. A significant portion of existing recordings are now in the database. I will also be adding a number of older recordings that were previously online but were removed a few years ago, as well as some newer recordings. I made very few recordings from late 2007 to early 2010, but I hope to start making more again.
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
Locomotive
Air Horn Guide
European Trains
France
SNCF Trains (17 recordings)Recording Equipment
I started recording trains with an old Radiola N2234 tape recorder. The recording quality is spectacular for a 30 year-old recorder with a built-in 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, it was revealed to be much inferior to that of the Radiola recorder when the two were compared. The Radiola recorder is currently still used for all recordings.
Recordings are transferred to the computer directly using a different tape player, since the Radiola recorder does not have a functioning line-out jack. The recordings are subsequently digitally edited using a program called Audacity, to remove imperfections, improve sound balance and eliminate volume fluctuations.