Rage of the Machines

Well, CSX-T is at it again.  Two solid months of funk.  I drove by their Milan Yard tonight, after my ears began ringing at 5:00 a.m.  It has been that way lately.  Instead of the A&R tooling over at 10:45 a.m. blowing its horn, now it begins at 5:00 in the morning.  Sometimes it's two.  Usually it has been 3:15 a.m., and it lumbers through at 3:30.  If I twitch my toes the engineer used to keep going leaving me the rest of the night to sleep in peace.  No longer.  No mas.  Now it unmitigated chaos.  Train funk all the time.  My hips began to hurt in bed, like they often do.  My ears have been ringing all day, and all because their is an idling locomotive sitting hidden in the CSX-T Milan Yard.  They pull it down just enough so you can't see it from their building, but if you pull down the road on the other side of the poison-laden wooded swamp at night you can see its headlight.  If you stop and roll down the window the noise of a grumbling locomotive is unmistakable.  Grumble, grumble, grumble.  Swiiiiiiiiiish as the pneumatic system vents pressure for its brakes.  Then it engine hunts.  The engine revs really high for a few seconds and then settles back to a low rumble.  Grumble, rumble, non-stop, 24/7.  It's glorious.  Why all the hub bub?  You can't literally hear it once you drive away, the rumble that is.  If you get a few wave lengths away, say a multiple of its fundamental, the strength of the infrasound wave is summed.  Each successive repetition of the firing rate of that mammoth prime mover produces yet another infrasonic wave we cannot hear.  They build up, and like other recognized standing waves (radar, sonar, etc.) sits in one place at a distance.  That place would be our house, my bedroom.  It is in my bed.  When the Amtrack engineer toddles through Fayettenam and stops at the station downtown, often he forgets to drop the lever to Notch 4.  In Notch 4 that GE 16 cylinder engine can produce electricity for the passenger train.  When it needs to pull out, Notch 8 is required.  Notch 8, the evil Notch 8, is vibration, diesel knock that is out of this world.  It would be like you are sitting on the hood of an eighteen wheeler.  Awful.  Again if I make rude gestures to modulate the infrasound wave letting the engineer know he is bothering not just me, a street, an entire neighborhood, but an entire city, he drops the lever to Notch 4.  I am not sure the educational requirements of an Amtrack train engineer merit this kind of influence.  It's like giving a mouse the key to the button, and we all ready have that.  I guess America has gone to giving unmitigated influence to the incapable.