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agreed with jim, Not much can be done about trains. Especially the sub bass rumble. This is the weight of hundreds of tons of steel and cargo pounding the ground and is transmitted through the GROUND! My building sits on a concrete pad and the whole structure shakes when they come through at speed westbound. Eastbound is an uphill grade and it's mostly engine noise with all motive power presumably in the "8th notch". (yes, total rail nerd here) which doesn't give me as much trouble as the westboard RUMBLE. I'm only a couple hundred yards from this freight line that sees 4 to 10 trains a day, Mon - Fri. mostly during daylight hours.
The horns pierce thru the walls (two road grade crossings out here, four blasts EACH per US federal law, loooong loooong... short loooooooong), and I'm given up on trying to keep it out of my recordings. I just have to pay attention to their schedule.
The engine noise is the least of my worries. The loud roar of the turbos is mostly blocked by my think walls and such. Still, certain RPMs from the engines resonant my walls WOOOM WOOOOM WOOOOM WOOOMM and even rattle a window from time to time.
Brake noise is infrequent at my location, but the occasion SKREEEEEE comes through but only on westbounds picking up too much speed coming down the mountain.
If you really want to accurately predict when trains are coming through, pick up a radio scanner ("monitor"), handheld or desktop, and get with local railfans to find out what frequencies the railroad is using for communications. As I understand it there will typically be one freq for train conductors to transmit on, and another for dispatch to provide traffic control with. Once you're famliar with train numbers and mile markers you can listen in and predict when a train will pass based on clearance from the dispatcher.
I don't do this, but I've encountered many railfans using handheld monitors to get themselves in position to take the best pictures of trains (yes, ppl do this, and it's fun).
Unfortunately trains make a lot of noise, and there's not a whole lot we can do about that. They're the lifeblood of the world economies, there's still things trucks can't do such as bulk raw materials and affordable public transit, and until we find a better way to move a whole lot of something cheaply, they're here to stay.
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