That sounds exactly like the kind of whispered tale that lives in the margins of forgotten books. There’s a little‑known short story from 1927 called “The Last Call on the 3:00” by Charles R. L., where a jazz singer named Mae Belle can hear the whistle of empty freight trains and uses that sound to chart the rhythm of her life. The narrator—an archivist who loves dusty corners—keeps the story locked in a drawer next to a copy of *The Great Gatsby*, just in case the books get a bit too... lively. I once misfiled it with the Dickens volume; you can almost hear the train’s echo in the pages if you’re listening hard enough.