During Chapter 3: Course Correction, after going through a brief Zero Gravity section on the way to the Engine Room, you have to proceed through a tunnel featuring blasting steam, flashing lights, and an extremely dense, loud noise lasting all throughout the room, referred to by some players as one of the scariest rooms in the game. According to series creator Glen Schofield in a 2019 Ars Technica interview, this sound originates from a recording of the trains in San Francisco's Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) system.

For decades, BART trains were infamous for producing a "high-pitched squeal" during turns that stemmed from a conscious design choice when engineers started building it in the mid-1960s to make the train wheels solid axle (connected) so that they rotated at the same rate. This made the trains relatively quiet on straightaways, which make up a majority of BART's tracks, but because of the design, one of the wheels ended up dragging against the rail on turns, with this friction causing the noise.

During Dead Space's development when this was still an issue, audio director Don Veca recounted his experience riding a BART train to Schofield (the following quote paraphrased by him):


The next day, Veca brought a microphone with him to record the noises. According to Schofield, the developers loved the resulting recordings, because it showed them a new way to use sound even more in the game's design by helping them realize how they could only use sound to scare people without relying on any enemies or other planned horror elements:


As for BART, they finally remedied the noise issues between October 2017 and February 2019, when they gradually replaced every train wheel in its fleet with new wheels designed to reduce the noise by as much as fifteen decibels, effectively making the riding experience "many times quieter than before".