A true account of the hazards of homesteading and the "coming of age" of the author. Peek's story recounts the joys and perils, the fear and bravery of his homesteading family. Set in Eastern Colorado, Loneliness Is a Train Whistle will give the reader a portrait of a bleak landscape and one family's attempt to live in it. Its author chronicles the challenges, hopes, joys, and hardships homesteading families often experienced, all through the eyes of his own coming-of-age. His story does not come from the romance of dime novels; instead, it presents the actual life of a homestead in one of the more barren landscapes in the last days of the homesteading west. The simple pleasures, daily dangers, and extraordinary hardships the story chronicles were all too real for the Peeks and their neighbors. Some succeeded, some failed, but all experienced extraordinary emotional and physical hardship. Yet, many of their lives also told a story of enduring, of surviving defeat and being able to tell the tale.