Eastern Railroad Discussion > Ambient Trains In The Distance Feed. 24/7 Stereo Rail & Weather.

I've resurrected this project after a house move in 2019 and for the lock-down. It is a playback of recorded audio files ~1/2 mile away from 3 grade crossings on the BNSF Mendota Sub in Princeton, Illinois. Over 100 different train passings and horn sequence segments were captured over several month periods in 2014 and 2015, and edited with added weather/nature sounds running simultaneously and in-between. The effort is to duplicate living near a busy mainline with audible passing trains. Not a web cam or scanner, but actual sounds of passing freights from a single location and lightly edited as a sleep aid or as background sound for work and club layouts/hobby stores or simply to relive an old family home that was near the tracks. With some professional radio broadcast software managing the playback timing, a sequence of grade crossings and ambient weather/nature sounds is never repeated and includes passing thunderstorms and rain showers. Location was from an abandoned farm outbuilding near 3 crossings and within earshot of the Amtrak stop in PCT. Rain, crickets, peep-toads, geese, songbirds and a few distant farm vehicles or traffic is audible along with passing trains every 30 minutes or so. With my local ISP (Comcast) performing just a bit more reliably llately, I've decided to share the project again. The "raw" feed from my server is here; http://myradiostream.com/aplacebythetracks and also a stream via tunein.com that allows mobile apps here; http://tunein.com/radio/A-Place-By-The-Tracks-s266757/. Note that the tunein stream sometimes includes a 30 second ad before my stream starts, but I average 10-12 hours before the stream "times out" or I have to refresh. It gets me nicely through a night's sleep or in the background during the day.  All loud sounds are edited out and the stream is treated with minimal real-time audio compression to keep the levels consistent. The links above take you to the stream, and a little more info is on a webs.com site I've put together; https://aplacebythetracks.webs.com/.

Mark Baker
La Salle, IL
Historic ROWs trace w/ USDA Aerials

A very cool idea.  Thank you for sharing your effort.