Ah, the stuff one learns along the way.

Model Railroader General Discussion (Model Railroader)
1

I am always impressed by how much I don’t know about trains/model trains. Even basic stuff.

The other day I went to a steam festival. Among other things I watched the demonstration of various steam whistles blown on a manifold in a static display. I dawned on me that I had always thought that the whistles operated like an organ…with what is called a mouth, flue and labium (I Googled it just now).

Turns out that while some steam boat whistles were like that, train steam whistles create a resonation by blasting the steam column up to the inner dome or bell of the steam whistle and then it is deflected down. That much was obvious to me as soon as I saw the exhaust of all the whistles blasting in a downward direction. Various sizes and shape of the brass “bell” part give various tones, of course.

I particularly liked the Penn Central 5 tone whistle.

2

“Penn Central five tone chime whistle”??? Did they say what kind of engine it came from?

3

Sounds like a PC 0-4-4-0 otherwise known as a GP9.[8D]

4

Sorry, did I type Penn Central? How careless. It was, of course, NYC.

Course, if you were really on the ball, you might have guessed that.

5

Some engineers had signature whistles.I could always tell when my Grandfather was behind the throttle.His sigature was a long whistle ended by 2 short “ha” “ha” sounding whistles before he entered the Columbus Union Station area.