Imagine this: You’re jolted awake by a 4:30 AM train whistle. Too early to get up, too late to sleep. What’s left to do? According to the “Baby Train” myth, this small-town conundrum has led to big-town birth rates. But is there more to this tale than a whistle and a wink?

The so-called “Baby Train” myth first appeared in a 1939 novel. Christopher Morley wrote in Kitty Foyle: “The first thing you hear mornings in Manitou is the early Q train to Chicago. It’s too early to get up and too late to go to sleep again. They have a legend out there that the morning yells of that rattler do a good deal to keep up the birth rate.”

That passage is pure fiction. But since then, the story has resurfaced in countless forms, often presented as fact.

Blowing the whistle on this urban legend

In many versions of the tale, a straight-laced government worker visits a town with a birth rate triple the national average. For a week, he collects data from packed maternity wards and overcrowded schools. Meanwhile, a mail train consistently wakes him at 4:30 AM with its obnoxious whistle.

Sleep-deprived and bewildered, he finally asks a local about their secret to cheerfulness despite their shattered sleep schedules. A mischievous elder explains, “The whistles wake everyone. It’s too early to get up, and too late to fall back asleep.”

David Mikkelson, founder of Snopes, investigated this myth. He found no evidence of any real town with such a phenomenon. The earliest version of the story was fictional, which doesn’t help its credibility. Folklorist Jan Harold Brunvand is so convinced the tale’s false he borrowed it for his 1993 book title: The Baby Train & Other Lusty Urban Legends.

Interestingly, some versions suggest the “Baby Train” dirty joke may predate locomotives. A 1967 Reader’s Digest anecdote hinted at an even older technology as a culprit:

“A harried young serviceman, tripping over small children, babies in buggies and the assorted paraphernalia of the very young in a shopping area of San Francisco, sputtered exasperatedly, ‘Good Lord! Don’t these people around here ever do anything else?’ A passerby commented knowingly, ‘It’s the foghorns.'”

Reader’s Digest, 1967

Turns out, the “Baby Train” doesn’t actually leave the station—except in our collective imagination. It’s a story that proves humor and a touch of mischief can travel faster than any locomotive.