Originally from Long Island, N.Y., Ziel traveled worldwide in pursuit of steam locomotives in the 1960s and early 1970s, publishing his images and observations in three books, “The Twilight of Steam Locomotives,” “Steam in the Sixties,” and “The Twilight of World Steam.” He also wrote “Steel Rails to the Sunrise” about the Long Island Rail Road, as well as four additional books about the LIRR. During his career, he published 15 books.
Ziel was a fine arts graduate of Pratt Institute in New York City and a U.S. Army veteran. It is estimated he took more than 25,000 photographs of working steam locomotives around the world. His photos and articles appeared in Railroad magazine, Trains and other rail publications.
His collection of images, historic and contemporary, of the Long Island Rail Road, as well as other transit vehicles on Long Island, is held by the Queens Library in New York. He personally purchased the Long Island’s steam rotary snowplow for preservation, and it is now part of the Steamtown National Historic Site collection in Scranton, Pa.
