So it turns out that if you were postal worker on that Night Train I mentioned a while ago, you’d know when to pick up or deliver the mail as you rode the train through each station by listening to the sounds of the train clattering on the tracks.  Apparently, you could hear distinctive “diddly-dum” sounds that would tell you where you were and how much farther you needed to go.

This information was explained in another cool kid’s exhibit at the National Railway Museum in York (the Karaoke exhibit I posted about earlier being another one)..  The kid in the photo below is holding onto a machine that, when rotated around, replicated the different sounds of the rails. “Diddly-dum” was how one of those sounds was described.

At the Diddly-dum display, National Railway Museum, York

Now, I found that fact both interesting and astonishing.

Interesting, because who knew that the sound of the trains clattering along the tracks would be  distinctive enough to be able to mark a location from it?

Astonishing, because it means that a crazy plot device I’d seen years ago on the old  The Avengers TV show turns out to be true.  You see, in one episode, Mrs. Peel finds a recording that her partner, John Steed, has made on his umbrella.

Well, his umbrella was more than just an umbrella, of course. I remember there being both a sword and a tape recorder in it – beyond that, I can’t say for sure.

Anyway, in the episode in question, Mrs. Peel and Steed had previously met an  eccentric old-time train worker who claimed, among other things, to be able to identify different sounds that the different trains made on the rails. Mrs. Peel later asks him to identify the “diddly-dum” patterns she finds recorded on the umbrella in hopes of locating the now-missing Steed. Here’s (Mrs. Peel’s transcription of Steed’s tape recording

Diddly-dah, diddly-dum, twiddly-dum, twiddly, twiddly, twiddly, dah; blinkety-blink, blinkety-blink, chaddily-dum, chaddily-dah, boopity-boop.  (Transcription  taken from this website about The Avengers TV show; also, click here to see the clip on YouTube; that part of the episode starts at about 2:02 into the clip.

I remember seeing the episode and thinking how cute — but preposterous — that a train aficionado would actually be able to identify the sound of the rails to figure out where Steed’s train might have been when he made the recording.  I should note that in the script it turns out that the railway guy figures out that the “diddly-do, diddly-dum, et al” sounds on Steed’s recording are NOT the sounds of a train at all, but a coded message for Mrs. Peel.

But of course – it started with a “diddly-do”, not a “”diddly-dum.” 😉

Now, The Avengers routinely had odd eccentrics that added to the bizarre overall charm of the show. I say that in affectionate way, as I always like Steed and Mrs. Peel and The Avengers in general. However, I was amazed at the discovery that here really was a basis in reality for this train sound thing. Who knew.

BTW,  The Avengers didn’t tackle some of the odd real life murder mysteries that can be drawn from the history of  train travel in England. Luckily, I happened on a museum guide who gave me a personal tour on that topic while I was in York.

Stay tuned.