In listening to all of this music, I've discovered (and then started paying attention to) ways in which trains are portrayed musically. To-day I listened to a compilation album of Lonnie Donegan and other skiffle artists titled
Original Hits of the Skiffle Explosion (the first two discs are Donegan, and the third is a variety of other artists), and I discovered that "Rock Island Line" - a song about a railroad line - has certain musical elements that emulate trains. Some of the background vocals contain "woo!"s, which sound like the train whistle, and the washboard mimics the sound of the wheels against the rails.
Some of the other songs on this collection are about trains and also feature train-influenced sounds.
"Wabash Cannonball" emulates the wheels-on-rails sounds with what I think is a snare drum played with brushes (I might be wrong on that; like I've said before, I know next to nothing about percussion), and some of Donegan's vocals are rather whistle-like, especially "call" in the line "hear the lonesome hobos call" near the end.
In "Wreck of the Old '97," the snare drum effect is also used, and the guitar part after the line "the whistle broke into a scream" mimics the whistle.
The guitar-as-whistle and washboard-as-wheels is also used on the Vipers Skiffle Group's "Streamline Train." Additionally, it emulates a train in starting out slow and then increasing tempo, like a train increasing in speed, before slowing down at the end.
Johnny Duncan & The Bluegrass Boys' "Last Train to San Fernando" also employs the tempo variations at the beginning and the end to sound train-like, and the repetitions of "last train" at the end are a bit like a train whistle. And at the very end, there's a vocal imitation of a train sound.
