The last trains passed through Salem, Indiana in 2008. This paper examines the enlistment of noise in the production of local railroad memory. I draw on participant-observation at the Depot, a public museum that invites visitors to imagine the heyday of Indiana’s Monon Railroad. The artifacts on display, from mail hooks to dining car dinner ware, testify to a time when passenger trains stopped along a corridor of nearby farm communities. I argue that a key to the Depot is its appeals to the ear. In this presentation, I turn to an elder volunteer named Jim Smoak as a primary interlocutor and expert practitioner of “train sound.” During the 1950s, Smoak was among a small handful of three-finger banjo stylists to make it in Nashville. At 91, now living in Indiana, he splits his music time with volunteer shifts at the Depot. I approach the social world of the Depot through Smoak, describing multiple activities that elicit locomotive acoustics in the space of the museum. These curatorial gestures range from the performance of loco-motivic bluegrass music to the demonstration of a pneumatic train whistle. Interpreting acoustic practices as a channel of local critique, I consider the sound culture of the Depot alongside authorized social analyses of the railroad soundscape (Leo Marx, Michel DeCerteau, R. Murray Schafer). Additionally, I offer the Depot case as a way to rethink the connection of soundscape to musicality, granting popular traditions of machine mimicry greater purchase with respect to one of ethnomusicology’s core theories: acoustemology.