Ziel, Ron, 1939-

Railway historian Ron Ziel was born July 17, 1939 in Manhattan. His family moved to eastern Queens in 1942, and eventually settled in Melville in 1949. He first became interested in railroads as a small child, when his mother would take him to watch the trains at the Long Island Rail Road stations at Queens Village and Bellerose.

He attended Huntington High School, graduating in 1957, and studied advertising design at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, earning a BFA in 1961. He first began photographing steam locomotives at Brooklyn's Eastern District Terminal in the fall of 1960. According to Mr. Ziel, these were the last steam locomotives to be used in freight service in the state of New York.

While at Pratt Mr. Ziel joined the ROTC, and upon graduation received a commission as a reserve second lieutenant in the United States Army. He served in the Army Signal Corps, stationed at Fort Gordon, Georgia, from September, 1961 to January, 1962, when he was given a medical discharge because of a diabetic condition. While stationed at Fort Gordon, Mr. Ziel began photographing steam locomotives in the southern United States. Eventually these photographs were included in his first book, "Twilight of Steam", published by Grosset and Dunlop in 1963. He has since written ten more books, including five about the Long Island Rail Road, and has also contributed articles and photographs to Railroad Magazine, Railfan and Railroad, and Trains Magazine. He also served as executive editor for Dan's Newspapers, a chain of community newspapers serving the East End of Long Island, in addition to working as a writer and staff photographer for those publications.

In 1965, Mr. Ziel and his longtime collaborator George Foster published the book "Steel Rails to the Sunrise". In the course of researching the book they met numerous railroad historians and photographers on Long Island (including many names represented in the Ziel Collection), an experience that led them to form a Long Island chapter of the National Railway Historical Society. The Long Island-Sunrise Trail Chapter was chartered in 1966, with Mr. Ziel serving as its first president, an office he held until 1969. Other founding members included Winfield S. Boerckel, F. Rodney Dirkes, Harold Fagerberg, Arthur J. Huneke and Robert Michel. Mr. Ziel was also the founder and first president of the Steam Locomotive 39 Preservation Fund, which was responsible for refurbishing LIRR Engine #39 and moving it from the Carriage House Museum in Stony Brook to a new location in Riverhead.

Throughout his life Mr. Ziel has traveled to over fifty countries and has, by his own estimate, taken over twenty five thousand photographs of steam locomotives in regular service. In April of 2005 Mr. Ziel moved from his long-time home in Water Mill, Long Island to Tucson, Arizona, where he currently resides.

The biographical sketches of the other photographers in the Ron Ziel Photograph Collection can be found in the finding aid.