There is a pedestrian bridge I keep meaning to stop using. It overlooks a siding where the yard stacks empty containers, and the metal decking rings like a sheet of drums whenever a truck crosses it — which, at four in the morning, is every time a truck thinks about crossing it.
Still, the 4:40 is worth the mistakes. The low frequency arrives about four seconds before the lights do. You hear an entire train you cannot see yet: the joints in the rail arriving as a slow woody tick, a coupler clunk that travels two cars and dies, and underneath everything a noise that is less a sound than a floor.
Recording note: the DR-05X with the windscreen on, at −12 dB, handles the freight fine. What it hates is the wind at bridge height, which I mistook for "atmosphere" for two unproductive weeks before I learned to hear the difference.
Next time I'm trying the underpass with the retaining wall. The wall should bounce the low end back toward me instead of dropping it into the river.