Set Up Running
The Life of a Pennsylvania Railroad Engineman, 1904-1949
392 pages | 12 illustrations/3 maps | 6 x 9 | 2001
Cloth edition is not available
ISBN 978-0-271-02741-8 | paper: $28.95 tr
A Keystone Book®
“Set Up Running describes life in engine service as seldom told before. You will like it. The good and the bad, the long, long nights, broken knuckles, pulled couplers, firemen that don’t know how to fire and don’t want to learn, derailments, engines that won’t steam, washouts—it’s all here. Not only is this an unvarnished story of what engine service was really like but it is also a valuable sociological portrait of railroading seldom explored in this detail. This was a difficult book for me to lay aside. . . . You will enjoy riding with engineer O. P. Orr in this true story of running an engine in the days of steam.” —Robert E. McMillan, The Lexington Quarterly
“The cumulative effect is an extended meditation on a lost world of rugged, single-minded men—almost monkish in their devotion to their job and ‘the company’—who once threaded their engines along river banks and down grades to deliver carloads of coal and lumber and merchandise to larger towns, where the freight was reshuffled into other trains and delivered to virtually every point on the continent.” —Mark Reutter, The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography
Set Up Running tells the story of a Pennsylvania Railroad locomotive engineer, Oscar P. Orr, who operated steam-powered freight and passenger trains throughout Central Pennsylvania and South Central New York. From 1904 to 1949, Orr sat at the controls of many famous steam locomotives; moved trains loaded with coal, perishables, and other freight; and encountered virtually every situation a locomotive engineer of that era could expect to see.
John W. (Jack) Orr, Oscar's son, tells his father's story, which begins at the Central Steam Heating Plant in Bellefonte, Pennsylvania. Oscar operated nearly every kind of steam locomotive the Pennsylvania Railroad owned, working from the bottom of the roster to the top position (number one in seniority). Orr has an ear for detail, and a vivid memory. He tells about his father's first encounter with an automobile along the right-of-way, about what it was like to operate a train in a blizzard, and about the difficulties railroadmen encountered in stopping a trainload of tank cars loaded with oil in order to take on water and coal-among many other stories in the author's large memory bank.
This compelling railroad history will enthrall not only everyone in the railroad community but also the general reader interested in railroads and trains, past and present.
The late John W. Orr graduated from Penn State University in 1949. He resided in Ralston, Pennsylvania.