On my first visit to the US, I was staying with a friend who lived close to the railroad tracks. During the night a train was approaching and honked his horn because of a nearby unsecured grade-level crossing. Man, I never woke up that fast at 3am in the middle of one of my R.E.M. phases. I mean I was standing next to the bed wondering what just happened to me. Growing up, I was used to a mere loud whistle, but that intensity could have woken a dead man!
The next morning over coffee, I asked my friend about the trains and he shrugged his shoulders and said, that he can't hear them anymore when they are driving by at night. Well since then, train horns became part of my life, wherever I lived, I was able to hear "short short long short" outbursts of air. Sometimes from a distance, sometimes closer to the tracks.
Trains fascinated me since my early childhood, when my grandfather took me to watch trains passing the big train bridge leading them into my hometown and the love never subdued. Recently we stumbled upon some special locomotives of a small local railroad, in yellow and blue livery. And that's where I took the picture of the train chimes as they are also called. I loved the minimal approach with the blue sky behind the horns.
And no, I did not know that there are that many different manufacturers of horns and that they all chime for a free-passing in different tones, till I stumbled upon the video below.