“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.
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