Maya lived in a little house near the railroad tracks. Every day, trains went rumbling by: long freight trains, shiny passenger trains, and sometimes just one engine all by itself.
And every time a train came near, Maya heard the whistle.
Sometimes it went whooooo, whooooo, whoo, whooooooo. Sometimes it went whoo-whoo. Sometimes it was just one long whooooooo.
"Grandpa," Maya asked one day, "why do trains whistle so much? Are they singing?"
Grandpa laughed. Grandpa had driven trains for many years, a long time ago. "Not singing, Maya," he said. "Talking."
"Talking?" Maya's eyes went wide. "Trains can talk?"
"In a way," said Grandpa. "The whistle is how a train says things. Every pattern means something. Long whistles and short whistles, put together like words. Do you want to learn some?"
"Yes!" said Maya.
Long and short
"First," said Grandpa, "you have to know the two sounds. There's a long one, like this: whoooooooo." He made the sound, low and long.
"And there's a short one, like this: whoo!" Quick and sharp.
"Long and short," said Maya. "Whoooooo and whoo!"
"That's it," said Grandpa. "Now let's put them together."
The crossing song
"The one you hear most," said Grandpa, "is when a train comes up to a road crossing, where cars drive across the tracks. Before it gets there, the train always says the same thing. Long, long, short, long."
He counted it out on his fingers: "Whooooo... whooooo... whoo... whoooooooooo."
"What does it mean?" asked Maya.
"It means, 'Here I come! Stay off the tracks! I'm crossing the road!'" said Grandpa. "The engineer starts blowing it before the crossing and keeps holding that last long one until the engine gets to the road. That way everybody knows a train is coming, even if they can't see it yet."
Maya listened. Far away, she heard a train. Whooooo... whooooo... whoo... whoooooooooo.
"Long, long, short, long!" she shouted. "It's crossing the road!"
"You've got it," said Grandpa, smiling.
More whistle words
"Here are some more," said Grandpa.
"Two long whistles, whoooooo, whoooooo, means 'I'm letting go of my brakes, here I go!' A train says that when it's about to start moving forward."
"Three short whistles, whoo! whoo! whoo!, when the train is stopped, means 'I'm going to back up!'"
"And one short whistle, whoo!, means 'I'm stopping.'"
Maya tried them all. Two long for going. Three short for backing up. One short for stopping. Long, long, short, long for crossing the road.
"It's like a secret code!" she said.
"It's not so secret," said Grandpa. "Every engineer in the country knows it. That's what makes it useful. When everyone uses the same code, everyone understands."
Why it matters
Then Grandpa got a little more serious.
"The most important thing the whistle says," he said, "is be careful. A train is very big and very heavy. Even when the engineer puts on the brakes as hard as they can, it takes a long, long way to stop. Much longer than a car or a bike. So the train can't stop if somebody is on the tracks. That's why the whistle warns everybody ahead of time."
"So I should never play on the tracks," said Maya.
"Never ever," said Grandpa. "Train tracks are for trains. We watch trains from far back, behind the fence or the crossing gates, with a grown-up. And when the lights flash and the gates come down, we wait until the train is all the way gone and the gates go back up."
Maya nodded. "Because the whistle says, 'Here I come!'"
"That's right," said Grandpa.
Listening at night
That night, Maya lay in bed. The house was quiet. Then, far away, she heard it.
Whooooo... whooooo... whoo... whoooooooooo.
She smiled in the dark. "Long, long, short, long," she whispered. "Here I come. I'm crossing the road."
And she listened to the train rumble by, saying hello and good night, until it was gone and she was fast asleep.
The End