Product Description

It 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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #126890 in Books
• Published on: 2005-10-10
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 376 pages

Review
"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

About the Author
John W. Orr graduated from Penn State in 1949. Recently deceased, he resided in Ralston, Pennsylvania.

Customer Reviews

Not only a biography of the man, but the locomotives as well
I am basically a collector of railroad biographies, every occupation from the President down to locomotive watchman, and I have to say that this has to be one of the best I have ever read. In fact, I would call this book a miracle. The details! The mind bending information that the author relays about his father's years of working as a locomotive engineer on the Pennsylvania Railroad is astounding. Just the everyday stories, the trips he made, the people he worked with, and the locomotives, the intricate details about each type, the power, how they handled..........incredible!! There is stuff in this book that guys who wrote first hand accounts don't even include.
If you ever wanted to know what it was like to operate a steam locomotive then this is absolutely the book to read.
I'll stop here because I can't say enough good things about this book.

Should Be on Your RR Bookshelf!
No matter what your railroad interest you'll find this oral history of Pennsy engineer Oscar Orr hard to put down. If you enjoy operations there are vivid descriptions of the daily chess moves that dispatchers and crews are forced to make on a single track helper district. Those devoted to locomotives will find details on the idiosyncracies of the Pennsylvania stable from the first half of the century. History buffs will enjoy watching the railroad town of Ralston go from boom to bust. Hidden in the chronicle of Orr's career is the history of industrial America, a time when "Company Man" was an accolade and clean overalls a symbol of pride in work. We are so lucky that deceased Trains Magazine editor David P.Morgan encouraged John Orr to pen his father's tales and that the University of Pennsylvania published them.

Railroad Father
"Set Up Running" is not a book of dry statistics of Pennsy RR trackage, assets, debits, or passenger-miles served. Neither is it a sensational narrative of harrowing accidents, up-set locomotives, or exploded boilers (although O.P. does have a few close scrapes, and the line of rail jacks exploding one after another as his massive 2-10-0 freight locomotive thunders down a track under repair sets the reader on the edge of his chair). No, this book is better than those sorts of books because it brings a man--actually two men--to life. We come to know O. P. Orr very well indeed through the eyes of his son, the author, John W. Orr, and we end up knowing John as well.

This book shows American history as it should be written--giant machines moving the citizens and the commerce of the land, a huge railroad corporation with all the bureaucratic "snafus" of any multi-layered business as those snafus are seen by and sometimes affect the career of an engineman, the impact of the Great Depression on one family as typical of America as any could be. Historical facts are all here, but they are facts as seen by two very real, very human people, a father and a son. Were all history books written so well, we would all understand history far better and read it far more willingly.

My own grandfather was an engineman, through his road was the Frisco rather than the Pennsy, and my own father was a great lover of trains, though his career paths took him in a different direction. I came along late in my father's life, and, by the time I had the ability and the leisure to write about him, he was gone and his history with him. "Set Up Running" is the type of book I wish someone could have written about my own father, and I know of no higher praise than that. This is a book for railroaders, historians, Americans, and every father's child. At the end, I hated to have to say good-bye to O.P.--and to his son John--but I left knowing much more about the first half of 20th Century America, and I really enjoyed the telling.