Railway Sounds

Ah.. you clicked onto this page because you thought it was an in-depth post about how to lay ballast or something? Sorry, it’s nothing of the sort – I just thought it would be a good title for my first post. I can’t promise to not mislead you again, after-all if inspiration strikes I have to follow it!

So here it is my first post. Let me introduce myself: I’m Martin, a theatre designer based on the Notts/Leics border –  My hobby is audio recording, especially railway audio recording I started doing it to collect sound effects for my fathers ‘O’ Gauge Model Railway but it’s long since become a personal pursuit. Railways and railway engines and trains make great subjects producing all manner of sounds from almighty whooshs of steam to gentle “ticking” and simmering sounds. Environmental recordings of railways is something I really enjoy… to be in the idyllic calm of the countryside and then to hear the majestic sounds of a Steam Train whistling by, or the gentle “Clackety-clack” of the a train of coaches slowly passing through a sleepy village.

Railways run in my family – although I’m not too up on the technical side of it. My great grandfather was a station master for the GCR/LNER and spent some time at Nottingham Victoria, my great Uncle was a driver for the LMS and drove the Royal Train at least once. My grandfather was a Vicar and a passionate O Gauge model maker and along with my father was one of the very early members of the Gauge O Guild, my father serving on the Committee for some time. He’s also a charted engineer and has worked as project engineer on a number of Locos in his time including things like the HST, Class 50 (a few others I can’t remember) and no end of DMU’s… he now works as a consultant and advises companies/countries on the construction of new railways. Needless to say his blog would probably be a lot more interesting than mine!

I think I caught the railway bug when I spent a lot of my youth working on “Palmerston” at both the Ffestiniog and in Staffordshire and am probably the only person in the world who can lay claim to having crawled around inside its saddle tank – something I definitely wouldn’t be able to do now i’m all grown up!

Tags: Ffestiniog, GCR, GOG, LMS, LNER

This entry was posted on Monday, July 13th, 2009 at 8:48 pm and is filed under Railway Ramblings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.