Saturday, February 20, 2010

How Many Trains Going By Would It Takes?

When I hear a train going by sometimes I start thinking about the damage that sound can do. This includes issues such as how many times does it take for the train to go by before it hurts anything?

But say you live somewhere where six or seven trains go by in a day. And you live fairly close. It seems like they'd be slowly shaking things off your shelf. It seems like I saw that one, a thing on a shelf jiggling with the vibrations and rumblings of the train.

Even more important would be the beams in your house or the foundation. You see some houses that are deteriorating -- going the way of all flesh. Or cracks form in the walls of your house or building. Some of it could just be the natural kinds of things, settlings, molecular rotting, things falling apart. But it seems to me that some of it could be caused and exacerbated by trains going by.

Figure it like this, a train going by one time wouldn't hurt too much. But the damage would be so incremental as to be unnoticeable. Like if you had six or seven trains a day multiplied by many years, 50-70 years, multiply it, that's a lot of trains!

If you can physically hear their whistles and rumbles with your ears, that's a vibration that your house is also "sensing." Things are moving, things are in motion, whether you know or realize it.

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