As a boy growing up in a small apartment in Munhall, Don Barnes collected photographs of airplanes.

As an adult, he expanded his interests, and his personal treasures ultimately grew to include full-size railroad cars.

For the past 18 years, he has shared the results of a lifetime of collecting at his Harlansburg Station Museum of Transportation in Scott, Lawrence County.

Mr. Barnes, 69, is a Coast Guard veteran and a retired US Air pilot.

His father, Joseph, worked at the U.S. Steel plant in Homestead.

Hoping to go to college with the help of GI Bill benefits, Mr. Barnes joined the Coast Guard Reserve while still in high school. Following his graduation in 1955 from Munhall Vocational High School, he served almost four years of active duty with the Coast Guard, much of it on international ice patrol in the North Atlantic. He also learned to fly while in the service.

After leaving the Coast Guard in 1958, he became a full-time worker at Bethlehem Steel's Rankin plant and a night student in engineering at the University of Pittsburgh.

Mr. Barnes was in his mid-20s when a friend took him for the airplane ride that changed his life. He found that he was much more interested in flying than in steel-making. He began to work part time as a pilot.

In 1963 he quit his job at Bethlehem Steel and got a job with Beckett Aviation. He quickly was co-piloting corporate flights, ferrying H. J. Heinz Co. executives.

When he began interviewing with airlines for full-time flying positions, he was the father of two young children. His wife, Patricia, urged him to stay in Pittsburgh, where both their families lived.

In 1966, he took a job with Allegheny Airlines, which became USAir in 1979. Rising through the ranks to senior captain, he retired in 1995, shortly before the company changed its name to US Airways.

All during his flying career, he was a visitor at air shows across the United States, always on the lookout for items to add to his growing collections. The best-known air shows included Oshkosh, Wis., and Sun 'n Fun in Lakeland, Fla. "There were a huge variety of aviation [items]," he said. "Everything from Wright Brothers to latest jets."

In the early 1970s, he and his family were living in the Ingomar area of McCandless. They found themselves needing more room after Mr. Barnes began constructing a two-seat experimental airplane in the family garage. The final stages of the project included coating the fabric covering the aircraft's body with a strong-smelling sealant known as "dope."

"My wife said I'm allowed to do carpentry, but 'This [smell of paint] is not gonna happen in my house,' " he recalled.

After plans to purchase a large farm with another amateur airplane builder fell through, Mr. Barnes in 1975 bought a smaller, 60-acre tract near Volant in Lawrence County.

"The first thing I built was a hangar, not [add to] the house," he said with a chuckle. With the help of his three older children, he went on to build a grass airstrip.

Although Mr. Barnes had started collecting things without any plans for public display, the idea of a museum developed after he had acquired several railroad cars for a restaurant project. The plan called for The Village Inn, a landmark eatery near his home, to provide food to patrons dining in the renovated railroad cars.

Those plans fell through when the restaurant changed hands, and the new operators had no interest in participating in the railroad-car project, Mr. Barnes said.

After purchasing half the restaurant parking lot, he started work on his own tourist attraction, which would include the railroad cars. He opened his museum in 1989.

The attraction of the Museum of Transportation lies not only in its antique collection, but in the rich knowledge of the collector regarding everything about transportation. Mr. Barnes serves as tour guide.

He and his wife have four children. Susan, an art teacher at Laurel High School, helps out at the museum gift shop. Thomas, who lives nearby, is a pilot for NetJets, for corporate clients. Daughters Nancy, a cake decorator, and Martha Jane, a discjockey, live in Columbus. Ohio.

After he began collecting photographs and before he began collecting full-size items, Mr. Barnes made model cars and airplanes. He has continued his model-building hobby and still is at work on the HO-scale train layout set up in one of the passenger cars.

He said he has tried to arrange displays to give visitors a sense of how people used to live.

In his museum, you can hear the sound of a steam engine, smell rubber and oil from an old garage and see colors change on an old traffic signal.

Just make sure you don't stop after seeing the red light at the entrance to the museum. Mr. Barnes welcomes visitors to share his joy in collecting and to take a dip into history.