There are whistleblowers in our society, and there are those who blow whistles.

Those of one group have gained the admiration of the public and the protection of the law for reporting from behind the scenes the affairs of government that suggest mismanagement, waste and perhaps fraud.

The other group, a lowly lot whose lingering presence the sleepy residents of Bangor’s Hancock Street would like removed permanently, has become a maligned segment of today’s world.

For blowing their whistles and hissing their brakes and rattling couplers that hold together the freight cars that move some of Maine’s products to market, the locomotive engineers of the Springfield Terminal Railway Co. collectively have become the area’s public enemy No. 1.

Repeatedly, residents of Hancock Street have reported they are “fed up” with night-time noise in what is left of Bangor’s freight yard. The residents want the noise stopped, they say. In fact, they want the railroad to take its noisy, smelly locomotives and an array of decrepit freight cars and move on down the line to Hermon or Waterville or someone else’s backyard.

If Springfield Terminal would take its tracks along with the last train out of town, that also would please the noise-sensitive folks down on Hancock Street.

These can’t be the same people who bemoaned the demise of dirty old Union Station and its pigeon-infested train shed some 30 years ago. Union Station, in its heyday, was home to a passel of steam and diesel locomotives that kept Hancock Street enveloped in clouds of coal and oil smoke for days at a time.

The recent remove-the-last-train syndrome seems to have afflicted people in Orono as well. They are lobbying the state and railroad to terminate the awful racket that a couple of freight trains create as they whistle their way along the Penobscot River under cover of darkness.

Back when trains were in vogue, the streamlined express known as the Gull screeched its way through Basin Mills, Veazie, Orono, Great Works and Old Town in the wee hours. One suspects that more than once an engineer tugged the whistle cord to serenade the folks on Hancock Street on the way out of town.

That was long ago, in a time when Hancock Street did not regard itself as one of the city’s more fashionable neighborhoods.

The Hancock Street complainants who don’t like the blasts from locomotive air horns or the smell of diesel exhaust probably would not want to live near an Interstate 95 exit either. There, one can experience 24 hours a day the cacophony of truck air horns and the pungent odors of a world gone mad in a romance with highway vehicles.

If, on a rare occasion, the noise from the “I” abates, one can take in the sounds of a 747 jetliner lifting off the runway at Bangor International Airport. The airport also boasts jet fighter pilots who have the ability to give noise a new meaning.

There is a solution to the offensive noise on Hancock Street, one that does not necessitate the removal of the last train from the freight yard. It simply requires a stereo set like the one the neighbors crank up on a Saturday night and a stack of country and western records or tapes. While the sound-sensitive person taps to the beat of a Hank Williams “lonesome-whistle” song, the freight train will make its appointed rounds, unobserved and unlamented.