My interest in steam locomotives goes back to childhood. My brother David and I inherited our love for trains from our father, Rev. Dr. R. D. Leonard, a Methodist minister and college professor. While other dads took their boys camping or to baseball games or museums, our dad took us on train-watching expeditions — to roundhouses, yards, shops, passenger stations or just trackside along busy lines. Most of these early trips involved Dad's favorite railroad, the New York Central. Our grandfather, Don M. Leonard, had been an official of the Boston & Albany, part of the New York Central System.

So railroads were our "thing" while growing up; we played, dreamed and talked trains. Sometimes, during church services while Dad was preaching, my brother and I would amuse ourselves by drawing pictures of steam locomotives with paper and pencils Mother thoughtfully provided. Walking home from junior high school in Adrian, Michigan, I would pause to watch the switching movements of the Detroit, Toledo & Ironton local freight on the Tecumseh branch, headed by a spic-and-span 2-8-0 with chromium-plated numbers under the cab window. I collected railroad passenger timetables, coaxing them out of taciturn station agents at every opportunity and even sending for them — with 1-cent and 2-cent post cards! — from passenger traffic departments of railroads, large and small, across the continent.

I can recall many scenes of steam railroad activity I witnessed in childhood and which I wish had been recorded on film: Consolidations with idler flat cars switching the railroad car ferries at Mackinaw City, Michigan; the fast passenger limiteds on the NYC's straight-as-an-arrow main line west of Toledo; vestibule-cabbed Wabash 4-8-4s and 4-8-2s spiriting freight trains through rural countryside in Lenawee County, Michigan; and (among my earliest memories) triple-heading Canadian Pacific and Boston & Maine power on the joint line north of St. Johnsbury, Vermont.

But Dad, for some reason, was not an avid photographer of trains. With a few exceptions, our "Steam Locomotive Archive" doesn't begin until I reached my teen years, in the early 1950s twilight of steam power. Finally bitten by the "bug," I borrowed our old Kodak Hawkeye folding cartridge camera which Dad had bought for $3.00 during the Depression, wheedled my parents into the purchase of rolls of No. 116 film, and set out for trackside in the little Michigan town of Bellevue on the Grand Trunk Western's Chicago-to-Canada main line where my father was then serving as the Methodist minister.

The old camera was limited to a shutter speed of 1/60th of a second, too slow to do much with action shots. Worse, it had a light leak in the bellows that caused me no end of grief — beautiful shots were often ruined by streaks of white in critical places. But it was all I had with which to record the steam action of various Michigan lines and then the railroads of central Illinois, where we moved in 1954. Finally, around 1957, I acquired my first 35mm camera and was able to photograph some late steam activity in the Midwest and West in both black-and-white film and color transparencies.

My younger brother, Rev. David V. Leonard, continued to pursue his train-photography efforts and now boasts a good slide, photo and video collection of his own work. As for Dad, after retirement from the faculty of Illinois Wesleyan University he became founding president of the Central Illinois Railroad Club, and in 1966 was one of three who signed the incorporation papers for what became the Monticello Railway Museum. I stopped photographing trains regularly after college. Except for a few short lines using smaller locomotives, the era of steam power in revenue service was over by the onset of the 1960s. Diesels never had much fascination for me, though a few that I photographed over the years turn out to be collectors' items now (see my Vintage Diesel Miscellany). I went into biblical and theological studies and developed other priorities that occupied me for several decades. But the archive of my 1950s train-photography career remains for you and me to enjoy.