Movie sound engineer Peter (Thomas) Handford died 6 November 2007. Born in Kent, England, on 21 March 1919, he shared an Oscar for Best Sound for 1985’s Out of Africa, and was best known for his sound location shooting and recording the last days of British steam trains.
He worked on genre films such as Holocaust 2000 (1977), From Beyond the Grave (1973), Frenzy (1972), Mysterious Island (1961), and also four episodes of the television series Tales of the Unexpected (1982).
The Independent has a nice, full obituary, and says that, after retiring in 1990, Handford “worked on his garden and archived his wondrous collection of sound recordings, supervising the transfers of his unique steam train effects onto CD, and lodging his whole collection with the National Railway Museum in York. ‘I’ve always loved trains, steam locomotives,’ he said. ‘I love the sound of trains because that’s what gives them their aura and mystique. You can get a sense of the weight and power of these mighty machines from the sound they make when they are puffing up an incline.'”