There’s something about the sound of a train whistle that can have a deep-rooted effect on people.

For some, it’s sort of nostalgic and romantic. For others, it’s haunting and unsettling. And for those who live too close to the tracks, it’s a major annoyance several times of the day and night.

At the Auburn homes I have known for more than half a century, the train whistle and rumble of the heavy cars moving along the tracks has been a welcome sound, and on our side of the Androscoggin, its changing tone with an east wind is a sure sign that rain will come before long.

I don’t remember the sound of steam locomotives, but I imagine my grandparents and great-grandparents knew just when to expect the passing of each steam-powered train on the Maine Central tracks across the river.

Just after the end of the Civil War, our family farm was under construction. Even then, that whistle must have echoed across the undammed Androscoggin as it flowed past valley farms. Based on some facts I came across recently, I’m fairly certain that I know who was in that cab with his hand on the whistle cord as the night trains rolled through Lewiston and Auburn.

Most likely, it was a remarkable man named George W. Adams, who was born in Durham about 1830. If you can say someone has railroading in his blood, that would certainly apply to Adams.

At the age of 85, Adams came back to Lewiston in 1915 from his later-years home in Massachusetts. He visited often, and he talked with a Lewiston Evening Journal reporter that year about his railroading career.

Adams was employed in the Auburn machine shop of “Uncle John Ferguson” around 1860. It was a very different Auburn with a Court Street that was barely a country road. The reporter described a tannery on one corner of Court and Main, and the bakery of Edmund Libbey on the other corner, where water power from the river mixed the dough. He said Adams recalled those early days when the site of the Empire Theater was “a huge ledge.”

In a few months after moving to Auburn, Adams was a fireman on the Maine Central Railroad, stoking 12 cords a day on a wood-fired locomotive for a salary of $45 a month. Within 15 months, he had been promoted to engineer on the “owl train” which ran nightly from Bangor to Portland.

The “owl train” was pulled by what Adams called the “inefficient little ‘Timmy Bowtelle’ engine.”

He told how he had to lean far out the window on winter nights because steam from the engine would form icicles on the window “as big as one’s wrist.”

In 1873, Adams was delighted to have his engine upgraded to the “Governor Coburn,” which was the first coal-burning locomotive on the Maine Central line.

Adams followed his railroading experience in Maine with a record 28 years without an accident on the Boston and Albany line. During that time, his family of two boys and a girl had grown up. One son had moved to Hawaii where he raised sugar cane. Much of the crop was then moved on a 60-mile narrow-gauge “lightly ballasted” railroad on Maui. It was rapidly becoming inadequate and, in 1900, the sugar plantation owner asked Adams if he could build a new railroad. Adams and the wife he had married in Auburn set sail for the Hawaiian Islands.

Most of the roadbed had to be relaid and much of it “double-tracked,” Adams told the reporter. The line was extended another 40 miles. It was a colossal task carried out with a lot of Japanese and native Hawaiian laborers.

Between Adams’ first residence in Auburn and his visits around 1915, the city changed a lot. The “country road” had become a busy Court Street and, on his visits, Adams was staying at the modern Elm House, where he undoubtedly thrilled many listeners with his adventures on the exotic islands in the Pacific. That well-known hotel is also long gone from its place between the present HRH (formerly Dunlap Insurance) building and the Key Bank building.

Many people say that train whistles remind them of faraway places. I never imagined that the frequent whistles from the trains passing through Lewiston and Auburn would make me think of Hawaii.

Dave Sargent is a freelance writer and an Auburn native. You can e-mail him at [email protected].