Set Up Running: The Life of a Pennsylvania Railroad Engineman, 1904-1949 (review)

Set Up Running: The Life of a Pennsylvania Railroad Engineman, 1904-1949. By John W. Orr. University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000. Pp. xvi+376. $38.50.

Despite the graphic depiction of on-the-job problems and irregular hours away from home, accounts of steam railroading often seem adventurous, even romantic, to those who have never toiled in midsummer heat for sixteen hours in the cab of a steam engine. John W. Orr's Set Up Running will not disappoint the reader of railroadiana. The title comes from "making a [seniority] date" as an engineman/locomotive engineer after one's promotion to that craft. The fireman's craft also receives ample attention, including the arduous labor of hand-firing a heavy Mikado freight locomotive. Orr covers with easy awareness the rules of thumb and tricks of the trade for these two functionally interrelated crafts.

The history of technology is replete with autobiographical accounts by North American railroaders. Orr's work is a largely a biography of his father Oscar, based mainly on the younger Orr's remembered conversations with the elder Orr, who was an engineer for the Pennsylvania Railroad. Cross-culturally assessed, informants customarily have problems producing accurate narratives of their own experience, often honestly recounted but empirically false. Filtering an experiential narrative through the vagaries of the memory of a second recounter (that is, John Orr's recollections of what he was told by Oscar Orr) complicates the issue of reliability. Yet John displays a broad familiarity with railroading, making his secondhand narrative more technically informative than some firsthand ones.

Take the tricks of handling a train of tank cars, with sloshing loads, or running an engine during switching moves while at the same time keeping a sharp eye out for men on the ground and for signals: Orr gets that right. At times, however, he fails to explain a perplexing action: Why did the engineer Orr light a pair of marker lamps on an assigned yard engine? As is often the way with an "old head," Orr sometimes neglects to explain rail argot—"running light," for example (it means an engine without cars). And to say, as he does, that an engineer "never had any fear of the steam engine" expresses a sentiment unknowable to anyone except the engineer.

Trains and engines are governed by operating rules and not "work rules" (conditions of employment deriving from a labor-management agreement). Yet John Orr feels that the biding system, according to seniority entitlement, is almost like playing poker. It must be said, though, that railroaders experience with seniority a precision of choice known in advance and based on an impartial ranking on a roster. On Oscar Orr's district, seniority enabled the recall in 1940 of employees who had been furloughed since 1930.

John Orr constructs a mosaic of colorful anecdotes of railroading. He also reports his own painful struggle with a profound illness and the opportunity it afforded for train watching. The highlights of his life include seeing a classic Pennsylvania Railroad K-4 Pacific, riding aboard a Raymond Loewy-styled GG-1 electric, and standing beside the Pennsylvania's avant-garde S1 Duplex (6-4-4-6) at the 1940 World's Fair. As for engineer Orr, one takes "student trips" as he works on almost every class of Pennsylvania steam engine, from six-coupled switchers to Decapods and mighty Mountains types. One comes to understand the tensions of the service—for example, the difficulty of becoming qualified to run out of the complex Enola Yard at Harrisburg, or fighting deep snow, or (horrors) violating a blue-flag protection.

This book about the two Orrs, father and son, provides agreeable reading and affords insights into railroading "from the head end" during the final half century of steam power. Had an index been included, it would have made a useful research tool.