The Bizarre, Weird and Funny World of the Locomotive Airhorn Enthusiast
Shôn Ellerton, July 3, 2025
Locomotive air horns are fascinating critters beholding quite a community of enthusiasts who collect and show them off.
Most of us have probably come across some odd and peculiar hobbies. Whether it is running down steep grassy hills trying to chase a wheel of cheese in rural England or the fine art of collecting untarnished toilet paper samples from around the world, as I once had the pleasure of viewing on a visit to one of my mother’s friends back in Colorado when I was a teenager.
Many hobbies bring groups of people sharing the same hobby together to demonstrate and take part. Model railways, remote-control aeroplanes, V8 cars, and kit rockets, as I once did myself, are fairly common hobbies in which coordinated events are held to show off. Then there are the, somewhat, stranger ones like stationary steam engines running on compressed air or steam ‘put-putting’ away with their proud owners sitting next to them reading a book or downing a pint of beer. About as boring as fishing in my opinion, but as the great comedian Jimmy Carr once said. ‘Boredom is underrated serenity’
However, there is one hobby which makes me chuckle every time I see a gathering of likeminded enthusiasts. Moreover, I think I could have a great time joining them as well.
And that is locomotive air horn collecting.
But first, a little about locomotive air horns and why I think they’re so fascinating. And why there is such an appeal for locomotive air horn collecting.
During the early 2000s, I was living in the UK, and after returning from a trip to the United States, was curious enough to do an Internet search on why locomotive air horns sound the way they do.
For those who live in the United States, Canada, rural Australia, and I assume many other places in the world where long freight trains roam, most of us have heard those spine-chilling horns accompanied by the low rumbling sound of a train being drawn by often two or more very powerful diesel locomotives. The phenomenon is even more mysterious and haunting in the middle of a cold night where the sound just seems to carry further. For those living in Europe, train locomotives are, sadly, fitted with quite pathetic single-tone horns, which would be more suited to a medium-sized truck on the road rather than a railroad.
The sound of your typical American locomotive horn is quite unique, but why?
Let’s start with cars. Car horns are ubiquitous, meant to be attention-grabbing, irritating, and, I suppose, generally standardised in terms of volume and pitch. Apparently, most are tuned to the musical note of F or F# for the more musically inclined among us.
Truck horns are similar but often, they may have two. A quieter one for urban areas and a louder one to scare the unaware car motorist in front. Think of the 1971 classic thriller TV movie, Duel! Like cars, they are often tuned to the same notes, but with quite a bit more welly.
Ship horns are loud and lonely-sounding being not too dissimilar to one of those large Alpenhorns. Being generally monotonic in sound, they do range enormously in frequency depending on the vessel concerned. Smaller boats range from 250 to 700 Hz while the big boats and land-based fog horns out there tend to operate between 70 and 700 Hz. 70 Hz is a damned low note and scary with it as it can be felt through the bones. Hear one of these horns at close range in the thick fog while on a small sailboat, I’d be crapping myself!
However, locomotive horns are surprisingly complex in design.
They’re certainly loud when compared to the loudest truck horn out there, but what makes them distinguishable is its polytonic sound created with a series of three, five, and, more rarely, seven horns of varying notes. Intriguingly, these horns are very often only designed with three, five, or seven horns, a series of numbers, most probably, coincidentally, shrouded in mystery by our ancient builders of society if one is into esotericism. Two-horn train horns are sometimes used but they sound totally lame in my opinion.
As with large ship horns, locomotive horns are guaranteed to get your attention. However, unlike the low frequency sounds one can achieve with a large ship horn to create an atmosphere of unease and dread, the locomotive horn achieves a similar result by combining the notes in a particular way. Low frequency horns are unsuited to railroads for two reasons. They are physically enormous and they are not ‘frantic’ enough sound-wise to signify a much faster and more lethal piece of machinery.
I did some research on this and, although it is a generalisation, passenger and freight trains employ different combination of notes. Remember, we are excluding the train horns of our European brethren which sound more like those ridiculous and incredibly annoying handheld horns they use in football matches. Passenger trains, for example, Amtrak, uses a combination of notes to create a sense of hurriedness and urgency. Being that much faster than your typical freight train, the method of sounding the horn is curt and decisive. The musical characteristic is happy and jolly being often chimed with Major 6th chords. Being in the Major key, there was research to suggest that passengers feel a little more at ease with its musical tonality. But, as with all trains, when one is near the trackside, they mean business and you better get out of their way, because passenger trains come quick. And with that loud horn, that shift in key induced from the resulting Doppler Effect is quite pronounced and impressive.
Freight trains? Totally different story.
If one can liken passenger train airhorns to the majesty of Jupiter, freight train airhorns are more akin to sombre Saturn. Like Saturn in its orbit around the Sun, freight trains are long, slow, relentless, rambling, and, in an odd sort of way, sad having no passengers in its seemingly endless journey along the rails to some destination far away. Rather than use a happy sounding Major chord, they tend to use either dissonant tritones or haunting and mysterious diminished 7th chords in the minor key. Connoisseurs of more complex music will appreciate that the world of music would be utterly boring if we played everything in a happy and jolly way in the Major key. Unlike the rushed and hurried pull of the chime on a passenger train, some operators take pride in pulling the horn chain in such a way as to gradually raise the horn through its various horns creating that symbolic mysterious sound that can be heard through the countryside.
At night, I remember sleeping in a farmhouse surrounding by the envelope of night’s silence bar from the crickets. Out in the distance, the slow clamouring of a train approaching with a crescendo of despair followed by the raising of goose pimples. As if by design, the sound of a freight train often tends to be heard from a greater distance than a passenger train.
One of the manufacturers of these horns, I believe it was from Nathan Horns, got quite carried away in creating possibly the most disturbing train horn of all time. If memory serves me correct, it was something like the Nathan P7X 3rd Generation model and it ran on one of the railroads in the eastern US. Purportedly, those who lived nearby complained about it stating that every time a train passed sounding this horn, it was demonic enough to run one’s blood cold and raise the undead. They were replaced with the very popular five-horn Nathan K5LLA, which, indeed, is an impressive sounding horn without being unsettling.
I think one of the major appeals of locomotive air horn collecting is its vast array of different sounds they can create. Car and truck horn collecting would simply not have the same appeal.
I first came across this hobby a long time ago back in the early 2000s whilst conducting a random Internet search on American locomotives. I came across a webpage called Ed’s Locomotive Horns, which sadly, seems to be out of action as of writing. It was a comprehensive but crudely-developed website listing out hundreds of different locomotive air horns along with sound snippets for many of them.
What’s strikingly funny about this hobby is the way the enthusiasts go about it. Most of them own pickup trucks fitted out with air compressors to which they can attach their beloved locomotive horns. Moreover, they have to go out in the sticks away from urban areas to demonstrate their horns’ abilities. Naturally, this is not the most sociable hobby if anyone happens to be unfortunate by living nearby. I don’t know what the local laws are for sounding a locomotive horn on a standard road vehicle, but can you imagine blasting a full-blown five-horn wonder behind a nervous granny driving on the road? Probably give someone a heart attack!
These air horn enthusiasts sometimes get together to hold their annual train horn fests, and, I have to say, they look like a lot of fun. On YouTube, there’s a great 45-minute video running through the various horns demonstrated during a 2024 train horn fest by someone who calls himself The Horn King. He fills up his pickup truck with a wide assortment of train horns and proudly runs through some of his prized possessions built by a wide range of manufacturers including Airchime, Leslie, Buell, and Prime, listing each one with cryptic letters and numbers.
Some hobbies are more expensive than others, but I’d say that locomotive airhorn collecting requires, somewhat, of a deep pocket. Some of these airhorns can set one back five to ten grand, or even far more, for rare models. And you need something to drive these horns. Your everyday little air compressor’s not going to get you very far with some of these models. At the annual train horn fest, someone kindly volunteered to provide no less than an 800-gallon air compressor, the size of which, was similar to an average household rainwater tank.
During the day, each horn was hooked up to the air compressor and given something like ten or so seconds to demonstrate it. And, by what I see in the video, there seems to be hundreds of them. Judging by the video, I’d say there were no more than a couple of dozen of entrants, but many brought their wives and families and feasted on good ‘ole fashioned barbecue-cooked food and lots of beer. Typical American heartland hospitality.
Each time a horn sounded, you can hear some of the bystanders cheering and making comments.
‘Hell, yeah!’
‘Oh man, that was awesome!’
Some, not so flattering when one of the horns, embarrassingly from Australia, could only muster what I could describe as a sick duck’s quack. Lots of laughter was heard followed by such comments as ‘What the actual eff was that?!’
All in all, it’s nice to see such unusual hobbies taking place and oh, what fun they must have had for the day.
Now if I could choose just one horn, I’d pick out the Leslie RS5T “King of Train Horns”. I’d strap it to my car and drive around the streets of Adelaide blasting it to scare off the hoon drivers and the kangaroos!
~
Here’s the link to the Horn King 2024 Annual Train Horn Fest.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=miDP98xKK9A&t=62s
Here’s an interesting playlist of some train horns in action.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL02SJYDMhhAsVhFiR30Vcw4tUFtPaghAc