I lived near steam trains——they were filthy things and I do not have any pleasant memories about them.
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There is no question that the reality of being near these things is a lot less romantic than watching the thing Barrel across the plains at high speed.
They are great when you only see them for a minute or two when they roar by at speed.
My grandparents lived in a B&O Rail Road town. I can remember steam engines going by the house. They had a picture of FDR on a wall upstairs. The clean wallpaper that was exposed was a revelation. The soot permeated everything so that you really didn’t notice.
A friend of mine who passed away some time ago began his railroad career as a fireman on a Class 1 railroad as it was in the process of abandoning the steam engine. In his later career as an engineer, young crews who would complain in his presence about the lack of creature comforts in an aging diesel loco would always be told how it was still "like riding in a new Cadillac" compared to the best steam engine. Like most of us, he could put on rose-colored glasses when talking about the good old days, but while he claimed that he would gladly return to the right seat of an Alco RS-1 or EMD F7 locomotive in a heartbeat, those glasses weren't ever tinted enough to make him want to return to running a steam engine.
That being said, he did believe in the preservation of what steam engines had survived the cutting torch. If he were alive today and was invited to the footplate, I am pretty certain he would want to get into the left side and show the young guy how to do it "right"... least for a couple of miles.
I too have unpleasant childhood memories of the sound made by locomotives as they drove east through the Sierra Nevadas from Colfax, California to Lake Tahoe. I’m not sure it was the same loco as the one described here, but in any case they were l-o-u-d.
I like old tech, and there’s an old inoperatble steam engine not too many miles from here, but they were as you say, dirty, loud, and wait a second... were we talking about 60s muscle cars?!?! ;^)
The problem with the steam locomotive is the need for soft brass parts, led to a huge labor cost for maintenance. When diesel and then disel-electric came online, employment by the railroads dropped a bunch. Indirectly, big-bore gasoline engines, the proliferation of paved roads (out where I’m from, that didn’t happen until the 20th century, and it isn’t quite done yet) led to freight coming off the rails and into panel trucks and trailers. Diesel trucks came on strong after WWII for freight, and buses (gasoline and diesel) for passengers.