The freights coming in were frequently deisel powered, but the helper engines added to get them over the Rocky Mountains were big Berkshires. Sometimes as many as ten of them were added to a mile-long freight train and, since they didn't have multiple unit controls in those days and the helpers were on front, in the middle and on the rear of the train, they talked to each other with their whistles to coordinate the process of starting the train moving. Beautiful.
From a standstill to a walking pace sometimes took five minutes or more. Getting all three groups of steam engines pulling together was not easy. The front would be pulling but not center and rear, so the front would slip its drivers, then chop his throttle. About that time the rear would begin pushing and maybe the middle, but the front would be dead weight because he'd cut his throttles, so they'd all slip their drivers, and about the time they chopped their throttles the front would start trying to pull again. Much whistling back and forth at each other. Once they got it started, pulling together was no problem and they would build speed rapidly.
Each engineer had his own whistle which he kept with him and put on the engine when he came to work. They tuned them up to their own liking, and no two sounded the same. In addition, each guy played the whistle differently, and some of them were real artists. The signals were set, two longs a short and another long for a grade crossing for instance, but each whistle had at least two to as many as four notes and what an engineer could do within the scope of those set signals was really something. They recognized each other by the sound of their whistles.
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