Trains are loud, and steam-powered locomotives probably louder than diesel-powered trains. But Julia Flynn Siler took that noise to a new level in her book, House of Mondavi. In the first chapter, she wrote of family patriarch Cesare Mondavi travelling to California:
"As their smoke-bellowing train transported the family across the Great Plains and the desert into California..."
So not only did Mondavi have to put up with rocking and rolling, clanking and clatter of the old train (not to mention cranky kids, sleepless nights and flatulent fellow travellers), but the smoke was yelling at him.
Billowing is what she was looking for.
bil·low (b
l
) n."A great swell, surge, or undulating mass, as of smoke or sound.
Dictionary.com tells us the origin:
1545–55; <>bylgja wave, c. MLG bulge; akin to OE gebylgan to anger, provoke
]
