Not all locomotives are equal, electric is much quieter than diesel

Both older DC and newer AC trains are effectively silent when coasting on a straight

The main sources of noise are cornering and braking. I live in a rare city that has narrow gauge for all of our rail, and am less than 200m from the busiest corridor in our state

I regret chosing an apartment on a tight bend (narrow gauge's bends are especially loud)

But if I were to live 500m away parallel to the track (as in, still 200m away from the track) the mostly AC electric trains going by every few minutes would be largely inaudible (<40dB)

My main point is tracks aren't loud, tight corners and areas around stops can be loud

I fear city planners aren't testing their decisions closely enough, though

On some urban rail lines, the main source of noise is the horn which they blow at every intersection.

Also, as a friend noticed when he bought a ver nice apartment next to the railroad is that they have to (at least in Sweden) maintain the tracks once a month. They do this by going very slowly with a special train that basically runs with the brakes on throwing sparks all over with all the noise you can imagine. And since it's going to slowly, they have to do it when there are the fewest number of other trains running, i.e. at three in the morning.

I grew up half a block from a freight train line, and you could hear it, but it wasn’t really an issue. Trains have gotten a lot louder in the US recently due to lack of rail maintenance. (Concretely, the transbay BART tube is screeches was above osha safety limits inside the car these days, but was quiet when new. The problem is that you need to grind rails to have a rounded top or they screech (and wear out train wheels), but BART doesn’t bother.

Anyway, noise pollution has a real impact on health, but so does particulate carbon and benzene from freeways. Before moving near a major road, find out what sort of PM 2.5 is typical, and check to see if everything is coated in black dust. If so, and you can afford some other place, move there instead.

> The problem is that you need to grind rails to have a rounded top or they screech (and wear out train wheels), but BART doesn’t bother.

I just Googled for <<does bart grind tracks and wheels?>>

Plenty of hits indicating that, yes, BART does grind tracks and wheels.

> was quiet when new

Do you mean in 1974 it was quiet? I tried to Google for any evidence of this and I can find nothing.

"does not screech horribly" isn't particularly noteworthy, to be fair

I got a friend who did the first grind ever in NZ a few years back, they borrowed the grinder locos from Aussie. Every train driver he talked to commented how amazingly better the rails were after grinding.

How many cities are split by a massive interstate highway? That noise is constant.

What kinds of noise do the trains produce? Do you think there are any ways to lessen it, and/or have any been implemented? (I'm thinking something like sound barriers).

I’ve lived near tracks a couple times and the loudest by far is the horn from at-grade crossings. If you are a heavy sleeper and a few blocks away it might not matter, but if you are nearby it is incredibly loud.

For what it’s worth, I lived 50 yards from an at-grade freight track in the city, where from 10pm-7am the trains did not blow their horns, relying on the crossing protective lights and gates only, and that worked for me. Charming train horns during the day (yes they occasionally interrupted me when speaking during video meetings, but it was quaint and no big deal), peace and quiet at night. Great neighborhood, quite desirable, and I would be happy to live there again in the future.

Not sure the safety track record, but if it’s favorable, perhaps this kind of program could be expanded.

https://www.sanjoseca.gov/your-government/departments-office...

Not a rail expert, not even a casual spectator. But my unstudied impression is that the noise that penetrates the most is the ultra-low frequency rumble that comes from the diesel side of the drivetrain, with a secondary source being steel on steel squealing of bogeys around bends at the minimal range of their tolerance. But the latter doesn't have the penetrating power of the former, not by a long shot, so to eliminate that I'm not sure if barrier would really have much of an effect. A lot of these in-town runs actually do have some sort of barrier already.

Instead powertrain would have to somehow switch entirely to battery while moving through sound propagating areas, and I'm assuming (maybe generously) that this is not already being done for some thorny technical reason and not just due to systemic inertia and complacency.

Japan puts tall fences around highways. I've assumed that's for the noise but never checked.

Example: https://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.webca...

Many states have those. If not barriers, then large trees.

Or just use electrified trains in the first place, like most of the modern world

Electric doesn't eliminate cornering and braking noises unfortunately, which I find as more pronounced open problems

That noise is far easier to mitigate with sound barriers

If you want especially quiet operations you can put rubber wheels on trains too.

I'm probably missing something, but why would an electric train need a battery?

What would the battery be used for?

The trains that make the most noise are diesel-electric, not electric; electric cross country freight trains aren't really a thing here. I don't DE engines have a battery in the conventional sense, although arguably their fuel tender full of diesel is a sort of battery. But in order for a train to be fully electric you would need to have a fully electrified infrastructure for freight rail, which we do not have and would be far-fetched as a solution compared to equipping such trains with a local battery tender when they come into town, in order to move them through the town (somewhat) quietly. after which they can switch back to diesel-electric power for the long cross country runs.

Electric freight trains make about as much noise as diesel electrics, since the vast majority of the noise either makes is the wheels hitting the rails and going screech. I had a hotel room in Switzerland next to a rail yard and learned this the hard way.

> But in order for a train to be fully electric you would need to have a fully electrified infrastructure for freight rail, which we do not have and would be far-fetched as a solution compared to equipping such trains with a local battery tender when they come into town, in order to move them through the town (somewhat) quietly. after which they can switch back to diesel-electric power for the long cross country runs.

Okay, I understand now.

An alternative proposition to installing batteries in DE engines is modifying them to be able to switch between electric lines (infrastructure) and the diesel engine.

This means that towns can lay down the infrastructure, so that the diesel is switched off when the engine is going through a town, and then switches on again when the infrastructure is no longer there.

The added benefit to this would be then that rolling out infrastructure gradually is not a problem: keep adding infrastructure over long distances and after a few decades the diesel engine won't be needed anymore.

> installing batteries in DE engines

Sadly I think even installing infrastructure for local electrification would not get out of the starting gate, because you need to both modify all of the engines involved, as well as add infrastructure to every affected town with all of the predictable pushback from people who will react negatively the notion of installing a bunch of extremely high power, highly visible catenary on already-dangerous rail paths.

But fortunately we can take advantage of a useful characteristic of trains, which is that it's quite natural to hook up a car called a tender, normally carrying fuel such as diesel or (in the old days) coal but in this case would be a giant battery on wheels that's been pre-charged and positioned on a siding outside of town at the crest of any convenient rise, ready for connection to incoming freight trains. These can then switch off (or idle) their diesel engines and draw on the battery for power as it passes into and out of town. Obviously a fee would be charged, but towns have all the leverage here- it's not as if the freight can just take some other set of train tracks that go around the town to avoid payong it.

This has the benefit of being extremely easy to get by in on, as it makes very little demand of both freight train operators and towns respectively. operators need to add nothing more than a simple transfer switch to the engine (which may already exist) and for the towns, the same high power electric circuit as catenary, minus all the catenar, and located on a short siding safely well out of town. And of course a couple great big batteries, but they are mobile and can go where the yrains are, thus far cheaper than putting poles in the ground everywhere the trains run.

I live about 150m from a line that goes over a bridge. Twice a day 4pm and 4am. It is not often the night train wakes me, often I wait to hear the click clacks before thinking it might be an earthquake.

The day train usually slows since coming the other way it is approaching a pedestrian crossing. I kinda love it because when it speeds up again you can hear it's giant turbo spooling... Sounds so good.

The rumbling also sounds kinda cool, sometimes it'll shake the house, I thought about setting up an accelerometer on and Arduino to swee what output I'd see.

Often however I think I hear the train but it's just the sea. Or I can hardly hear the train for the noise of the sea.

I live in a small town and the loudest sounds besides the train itself is the extremely loud horn it blows before every crossing. Apparently nobody wants to pay for automatic booms at the road crossings so it legally has to use the horn that blasts through the area.

We have booms and the horns still legally have to blast the entire neighborhood at 12am...or 4am.

I live next to an intermodal train yard. Literally outside my windows [1].

I love the noise and the trains. You get used to the sounds, and it becomes comforting. Like a loud rain on a rooftop. I feel strange when it's quiet.

There are some homes by Georgia Tech that are literally feet from the tracks [2], and I think those are awesome. I also hope these trains don't derail frequently like the ones in Hulsey Yard do.

[1] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ZVX0KMTa8ZA

[2] https://www.redfin.com/GA/Atlanta/576-Marietta-St-NW-30313/h...

I've always found rail noises subjectively much less stressing than car noise.

A well maintained line and fleet would also not have that much screeching.