Train Horns in St. Louis Spark a Song, a Website, and Advocacy
Date Posted: October 6, 2026
Posted In: Discussion,
From St. Louis Post-Dispatch: ‘This one’s for The Hill. Dogtown. Carondelet. Tower Grove.
Everybody who got a wake-up call at 2 a.m. from a freight train.
City Hall, this is your alarm clock.’
Tommy O’Shaughnessy didn’t plan on writing a protest song during his sabbatical.
But the roaring sound of a train horn in the middle of the night tends to change things. O’Shaughnessy and his wife, Emily, live in Dogtown, about three blocks north of Manchester Avenue and adjacent train tracks.
They have been there about 8 years, and they have loved their century-old house and the surrounding area. They can walk to coffee shops, restaurants and bars. The neighborhood is vibrant but generally quiet at night.
That changed in September, when the city’s “quiet zone” exemption at railway crossings expired and train engineers started blaring horns, throughout the day and night, when they came to a crossing.
The loss of the exemption was a long time coming. Eighteen years, to be precise.
‘You had eighteen years, eighteen years
Every letter in the inbox, every warning in the drawer
Now the horn’s on my pillow and I can’t take no more.’
O’Shaughnessy learned that city officials had been warned by the Federal Railroad Administration — for 18 years — to upgrade their signage and street markings around railroad crossings or lose the quiet-zone exemption. He was beside himself. He was on sabbatical from his job at a start-up real estate marketing firm, so he created a website to inform his neighbors and ask them to sign a petition urging the city to act quickly.