In my search for quiet, I often carry a decibel meter around. Amtrak cars, even the quiet cars, have a constant 90 decibel background noise when in motion (measured with a C weighting). It seems like a lot of the train noise is in the low frequencies and the A weighting OSHA uses is the only thing keeping Amtrak out of violation.
Yeah, part of my point was that American train systems are old and awful and noisy. I had the pleasure of riding a smaller Deutsche Bahn commuter train once and the ambient noise had to be in the 50-60 dB range, if not lower.
Depends on your keyboard and force. For example, a MacBook is generally quieter than other laptops but then again once those keys get old they can get quite loose and clackety. What I can say for sure is that those train cars can be pretty damn quiet. I know the quiet car I ride in is possibly quieter than my own car. And when it's silent the ambient noise tends to sound even more faint until someone on the inside starts making some really annoying sounds. I'd also say its sometimes not so much about the volume itself but rather the type of sound. Someone talking on a cellphone is less annoying than a phome ringing which is less annoying than that damn texting keyboard "click" sound which is equally annoying as typing too hard.
Yes! This and the comment below points out the space bar is also a very loud key we can single out on all keyboards. I set my trackpad to use tap to click because I prefer it and it avoids that sound but I do occasionally click by pressing it. Now you've got me thinking how disturbing I might be with my occasional clicking on my MacBook Air on the quiet car.
I've not ridden Amtrak, just Caltrain, but as regards UK trains the answer is that background noise doesn't matter.
People generally talk loud enough to happily hear each other over any background noise. They tend not to notice, either.
As such, when businesspeople consider the quiet car somewhere for meetings because everywhere else has noise, everyone in the car hears exactly what they are discussing.
I'm on the bus at the moment on the way to work, I use a Lenovo Thinkpad Edge in my personal time, it's a decent machine and was within my budget at the time I bought it, but I agree, the keyboard can be extremely loud in quiet areas, but that's one of the reasons I like it.
My iMac at work has a nearly silent keyboard and it drives me up the walls, being so used to developing in my spare time on a loud machine.
