Don't You Hear the Whistle Blowing?

The first house I ever owned – several decades ago – backed onto railroad tracks. It’s what I could afford. A few trains a day went by and it wasn’t long before the noise blended in with my day-to-day life.

The trains never came to my attention again until a few years later when I tried to sell the house and discovered that there were a lot of picky homebuyers out there who did not want to live next to a railroad. I finally sold the house to a local who knew about the trains and didn’t care; he was buying an investment rental.

This past winter Hillsborough’s Board of Adjustment began hearing an application for a proposed 7-home subdivision along a railroad track. While none of the nearby neighbors objected to the development itself, they protested vociferously about the possible loss of the property’s woods that serve to partially buffer them from the trains traveling behind their houses and the bells and lights of the nearby railroad crossing.

One of the residents commented that when he bought his house he had been told there was only about one train a day. The board laughed. The attorney’s laughed. The press laughed. And, bitterly, the local residents laughed.

With today’s disclosure laws, the sellers will probably have to be upfront about the amount of train traffic behind these proposed single-family 3200 to 3500 square foot homes.

Unless the Board can find some reason to deny the application, good luck to the new owners and we all hope they purchase these homes with their eyes and especially their ears wide open.

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Hillsborough’s growing transload facility and the township’s plan for a transit village encouraging passenger train service can only increase the numbers of trains.

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I’m not sure where American literature [maybe through the first half of the twentieth century] came by the legend of the romance of the train – the whistle across the plains making the protagonist wonder about the rest of the world. Maybe it had something to do with the train not being in their back yard or the fact that most of the locals would never travel further than their county seat making train travel only an exotic dream.

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"...Don't you hear the whistle blowing?
Rise up so early in the morn..." - from I've Been Working on the Railroad.

It seemed like such fun when you sang this in second grade.