This is the second in a line of CDs designed specifically for use in the train room. This does not feature long recordings of trains as they were heard in real life with all the environmental sounds heard at the time. Rather, this CD features non-stop action as recordings are mixed into the space of 62 minutes.
The sounds on this CD represent a busy diesel era mainline. Both EMD and General Electric power is heard, and the sounds on this CD could represent anything from the seventies up to the present day.
How did we do it? We started with the sounds of songbirds recorded in the woods in the Shawnee National Forest in southern Illinois. With this as a backdrop, we added train after train into the mix until there is something happening all the time. There is either a train passing, approaching, or fading at any given moment; and much of the time more than one train can be heard.
This CD is comprised of a single 62 minute track.
The trains on this disc were recorded as the same location in 2000 and 2001. The location was beneath the approach to the Big Muddy River Bridge at milepost 94 on the Union Pacific’s Chester Subdivision. The location is near the ghost town of Aldridge, Illinois, in the deep southern part of the state. The line at this location is the mainline from Chicago and St. Louis to Texas and the Gulf Coast. The sounds were recorded during the overnight hours while camping on the river floodplain over several nights.
