Steam locomotive sound

A steam locomotive has no gearbox and no idle in the way an engine does, so this preset breaks most of the rules the rest of the library follows. It runs one ratio at 42 km/h per 1000 rpm, which means road speed maps straight onto chuff rate with nothing in between.

Ten seconds from a standing start. The launch, the gearbox working up through the ratios, then the overrun as the throttle closes. Driven by the same gearbox model the simulator runs, so the shift points are the ones you would hear in the car.

Firings per revolution are set to 0.5, the lowest value in the library and shared only with the big single. Half an event per revolution stretches them far enough apart that the ear counts them individually rather than fusing them into a pitch. Down near the 430 rpm idle you hear separate chuffs. By 1,500 they begin to run together, which is the same thing that happens to a real locomotive as it gets going.

Noise is set to 200, higher than anything else here, because a steam engine is mostly not combustion. It is escaping steam, and steam is broadband. Pipe length goes to 220, the longest exhaust model on the site, giving the chimney its slow hollow decay. Bass at 155 and sub at 120 carry the mass.

Unevenness at 45 and jitter at 25 keep the chuffs off a grid. A perfectly regular locomotive sounds like a drum machine, and the wrongness is obvious within two seconds.

The ceiling is 2,600 and the shift point is meaningless with one gear, so the whole range is a single accelerating chuff. It is the preset most likely to make a passenger ask what you have done to the car.

Specification

Every figure above is read from the preset the app actually runs, not retyped.

Drive it

Open the simulator with this engine selected, allow location, and press ignition. See how it works for what happens between GPS and sound.

Related

• Single-cylinder thumper sound
• Radial prop plane sound
• Jet turbine sound

Every other engine

• RECORDED CARS
  • BAC Mono
  • Ferrari 458
  • BMW M1 Procar
• SUPERCARS
  • Muscle V8
  • Modern V8
  • V10
  • V12
  • Anti-lag rally car
  • Air-cooled flat-six
• NORMAL CARS
  • Three-cylinder
  • Four-cylinder
  • Turbo hot hatch
  • Inline-six
  • Diesel
  • Flat-four boxer
• FUN SOUNDS
  • Radial prop plane
  • Jet turbine
  • Alien craft
  • Single-cylinder thumper

All twenty on one page, with redline and gear count for each.