Railways and the Urban Soundscape: Montreal, 1850s–1950s
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Recent work on the history of railways has focused on the ways in which they changed the experience of space. Studies of urban settings have examined the role of railway tracks in delineating and reaffirming identities of class and ethnicity; they have also looked at the housing and neighborhoods that grew up around railway yards. This article contributes to the literature on railways and urban space by exploring the meanings of train sounds, in particular those produced by bells and steam whistles, in Montreal. The sounds made by trains were among the loudest to arrive in the 19th-century world, and had a particularly dramatic impact upon urban areas. Train whistles and bells had diverse meanings, depending on the precise moment and place at which they were sounded, the duration of the sound, and who was listening. These meanings were integrated into various forms of urban knowledge, and constituted one element of what historian David Garrioch calls “a semiotic system,” part of a larger “urban information system.” This article explores the confrontation between two interpretations of the sounds made by train bells and steam whistles in the region of Montreal between 1850 and 1950, namely, the conflicts between those who saw bells and whistles as elements of a language of safety for railway workers and city dwellers, on the one hand, and, on the other, those who increasingly viewed them as an unwelcome source of urban noise.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.017 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".