Famous Train Whistle
Jones was also famous for his peculiar skill with the train whistle. His whistle was made of six thin tubes bound together, the shortest being half the length of the longest. Its unique sound involved a long-drawn-out note that began softly, rose and then died away to a whisper, a sound that became his trademark. The sound of it was variously described as "a sort of whippoorwill call," or "like the war cry of a Viking.” People living along the Illinois Central right-of-way between Jackson, Tennessee, and Water Valley, Mississippi, would turn over in their beds late at night upon hearing it and say “There goes Casey Jones” as he roared by.
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Famous quotes containing the words famous, train and/or whistle:
“In a famous Middletown study of Muncie, Indiana, in 1924, mothers were asked to rank the qualities they most desire in their children. At the top of the list were conformity and strict obedience. More than fifty years later, when the Middletown survey was replicated, mothers placed autonomy and independence first. The healthiest parenting probably promotes a balance of these qualities in children.”
—Richard Louv (20th century)
“We teach boys to be such men as we are. We do not teach them to aspire to be all they can. We do not give them a training as if we believed in their noble nature. We scarce educate their bodies. We do not train the eye and the hand. We exercise their understandings to the apprehension and comparison of some facts, to a skill in numbers, in words; we aim to make accountants, attorneys, engineers; but not to make able, earnest, great- hearted men.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The bud of the apple is desire, the down-falling gold,
The catbird’s gobble in the morning half-awake
These are real only if I make them so. Whistle
For me, grow green for me and, as you whistle and grow green,
Intangible arrows quiver and stick in the skin
And I taste at the root of the tongue the unreal of what is real.”
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)