UP 844 Whistle

[dmgibbs1997]

I've watch Fan Railer's Train Simulator videos and this makes me ask, I know SPACE is how you actually blow the whistle, but what do you have to do to quill the whistle on UP 844, or any steam locomotive? And how do you immediately do a full blast of the whistle? He does that very well!

[jalsina]

Space and make it quillable with Enter

[Smokebox]

In the Advanced version, besides using the Enter key (while the spacebar is pressed), you can also quill the whistle by pulling down on the cord just a little bit (the pitch is lower when the cord is nearly at the top).

[slugwash]

Great words: Quill and Quillable! - and new to me in this sense. I can find many references, but very few that apply to steam whistles. Obviously the connection is "hollow reed or pipe" - luckily (at least for me) Wkipedia has a whole section, which includes this little gem of information:

Blowing pressure – Frequency increases with blowing pressure,[31] which determines gas volume flow through the whistle, allowing a locomotive engineer to play a whistle like a musical instrument, using the valve to vary the flow of steam. The term for this was “quilling.” An experiment with a short plain whistle reported in 1883 showed that incrementally increasing steam pressure drove the whistle from E to D-flat, a 68 percent increase in frequency.[32] Pitch deviations from the whistle natural frequency likely follow velocity differences in the steam jet downstream from the aperture, creating phase differences between driving frequency and natural frequency of the whistle. Although at normal blowing pressures the aperture constrains the jet to the speed of sound, once it exits the aperture and expands, velocity decay is a function of absolute pressure.[33] Also, frequency may vary at a fixed blowing pressure with differences in temperature of steam or compressed air.[34][35][36] Industrial steam whistles typically were operated in the range of 100 to 300 pounds per square inch gauge pressure (psig) (0.7 - 2.1 megapascals, MPa), although some were constructed for use on pressures as high as 600 psig (4.1 MPa). All of these pressures are within the choked flow regime,[37] where mass flow scales with upstream absolute pressure and inversely with the square root of absolute temperature. This means that for dry saturated steam, a halving of absolute pressure results in almost a halving of flow.[38][39] This has been confirmed by tests of whistle steam consumption at various pressures.[40] Excessive pressure for a given whistle design will drive the whistle into an overblown mode, where the fundamental frequency will be replaced by an odd harmonic, that is a frequency that is an odd number multiple of the fundamental. Usually this is the third harmonic (second overtone frequency), but an example has been noted where a large whistle jumped to the fifteenth harmonic.[41] A long narrow whistle such as that of the Liberty ship John W. Brown sounds a rich spectrum of overtones, but is not overblown. (In overblowing the "amplitude of the pipe fundamental frequency falls to zero.")[42] Increasing whistle length increases the number and amplitude of harmonics, as has been demonstrated in experiments with a variable-pitch whistle. Whistles tested on steam produce both even-numbered and odd-numbered harmonics.[41] The harmonic profile of a whistle might also be influenced by aperture width, mouth cut-up, and lip-aperture offset, as is the case for organ pipes.[43]

Has anyone every recorded a full and recognisable tune?