Just before WW II began, the transition from steam to Diesel had begun on US railroads. The wartime need for every available locomotive (and the fact that submarine Diesels and rail Diesels were so closely similar) put a stop to it.

When it was again possible to travel, the great steam engines were still at work. On one of the occasions when my dad took me up a station platform to see the engine, it had big black plates on either side of the front of the smokebox. It was as though the engine was shy, not wanting to show its face. I asked what they were for but my dad didn’t know.

We’ve all had such experiences – seeing something special, unusual, and not at the time being able to know what it was. The question stays with us, often for decades. Cold cases.

I moved from the Boston area to western Massachusetts at the end of 1977. Little did I know that this small city had once been clustered around a railway maintenance center. It closed some time in the 1930s but sitting on a shelf in the town library was a “Handbook for Railroad Engineers,” containing useful stuff like how to remove and inactivate one side-rod (carrying the force of the steam piston to the drive wheels) and still reach the destination.

That book would soon be cleared in the dynamic program so many libraries suffered—of putting books that circulate slowly or not at all on the bargain table to make room for “books of current interest.”

Before that, there I was with it before me, staring. Those plates I had asked about as a little boy were explained. They called them ‘elephant ears’ and their purpose was to stop air from flowing mainly around the sides of the loco, and instead direct it upward, to carry smoke and cinders from the stack high up. Question answered.

In the spring of 1950 I was outdoors looking for things to do when I heard popping and banging. Hoping to see an antique car, I looked up Rte. 126 toward Wayland. Nothing. Nothing toward Lincoln either.

Then I looked up. All in an instant I saw a single-engined military plane, its exhaust making the sound I’d heard. The canopy – one of those multi-paned things they called a “greenhouse” – slid back and the pilot clambered out. His parachute opened and he drifted away across a farmer’s field, toward a tree line. The airplane crashed and a great shako-shaped black cloud with orange licks of flame in it shot up.

Years later, while working on my B-29 engine problems database, I decided to buy a copy of the official report of the crash I had witnessed. The airplane was an F4F (or later variant) and the pilot was uninjured. I remembered the greenhouse, and I knew it was a single-seater. It was grand to find childhood memories fit the historical record.

Two years later I was imprinted with the sights and sounds of a big air-cooled radial aircraft engine, starting up. This was the big family trip to Alaska, driving across the country and up though Canada to reach Fairbanks.

Later, standing on the cobble flat of the Koyukuk River, I stared at a barn-red Noorduyn ‘Norseman’ floatplane as it emitted a mysterious rising whine. This was its inertia starter, using a low-current electric motor to accelerate a flywheel. When the flywheel was clutched with a yelp to the crankshaft there came a couple of coughs, then silence. The pilot re-accelerated the flywheel and this time the engine coughed and shook, shot out oily smoke, and ran. After warm-up, the pilot taxied out to deeper water and took off. Irresistible, unforgettable internal combustion drama.

Even though the great radials had even firing orders, their sound is syncopated. As the exhaust ports on one side of the engine are almost four feet away from those on the other, as the firing marches around a running engine, there is a cyclic flutter in how far away the sound source is. I seldom hear it today, but when I do, I run out of the house to see what is flying over.