By now, you're familiar with my late father, at least from his photographs in my body of work and in some of our Steam Through Port Credit previews of late. In early summer 1959, while his (and my mom's) house was being built in Barrie, Ontario, he ventured over to Allandale. In those days still, Barrie and Allandale were two different places. Barrie was, well, Ontario's Most Progressive City. Allandale was known as The Railway Ward.

I need not tell you which identity I preferred of the two. Or which part of town.

Anyhow, the storage tracks at Allandale, where the reserve stocks of coal had stood only two or three years ago, were now filled with more than five dozen steam locomotives collected from the furthest reaches of the Northern Ontario District. They would languish and rust, ravaged by trophy hunters interested in bells and number plates, until November 1961.

One of those engines was Mikado 3254, outshopped from Stratford with a full overhaul on February 19, 1958. Thereafter, she'd been stored serviceable at Foleyet (midway between Capreol and Hornepayne), never to turn another mile in CNR service. She'd been towed to Allandale in the early part of 1959, not long before Dad happened upon her.

Here, CNR Mikado 3254's story should have ended. The cutting torches at London's Reclamation Yard awaited her and more than three dozen of her sisters condemned at Allandale. But Fortune favoured this locomotive. A man named Willis F. Barron of Ashland, Pennsylvania had spotted her. While her sisters were being paraded to London, he purchased number 3254 on November 14, 1961.

About a year later, on October 2, 1962, my friend Bob Sandusky photographed CNR Mikado 3254 outside Mimico roundhouse. She would soon be en route to the United States, and preservation. Not long afterward, my late friend Don Wood caught up to her at Gettysburg, Pa., where she was none the worse for wear (having been disassembled into three pieces for local transport, no less).

Of course, Canadian National 3254 would steam again. In fact, she'd be beautifully restored and operate for many years at Scranton, Pennsylvania. Your author saw this locomotive on numerous occasions, rode in her cab three or four times, and got to know the men who ran her. One of them, retired CNR Northern Ontario District engineer Bill Cole, who had operated number 3254 and many of her sisters in the 1950s, told me that this locomotive was every bit the same in the early 2000s as she was in the mid-1950s.

This story is by way of analogy, I suppose. Your narrator has happened upon something, much as Mac Wilson, Willis Barron, Bob Sandusky and Don Wood had in the form of CNR Mikado 3254. Only, this time, it's not a locomotive. It's an entire Canadian National Railways Southern Ontario District 39.3 mile length of double track known as the Oakville Subdivision. And, like engine 3254, the steam-era Oakville Subdivision will live again—in the 192 pages of Steam Through Port Credit.

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