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Title: Set Up Running: The Life of a Pennsylvania Railroad Engineman 1904-1949 by John W. Orr, James D. Porterfield ISBN: 0-271-02056-3 Publisher: Pennsylvania State Univ Pr (Trd) Pub. Date: March, 2001 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $38.50 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.78 (9 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Railroad Father
Comment: "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.
Rating: 5
Summary: Set up Running
Comment: This is what too many railroad histories lack -- the human element. This is the story of a man and how he ran locomotives across Pennsylvania. It is also the story of his son, who loved trains and loved to listen to his father's stories. If you are frustrated by railroad histories that are nothing but an endless series of stock transactions, then this is your book.
Rating: 4
Summary: Incredible insights on a working man's life on the railroad
Comment: This book brings to life the hard, gritty and dangerous life of working on the railroad. While there's a ton of romaniticized railroad books, this one give the reader insights of what the working stiff had to endure. It does it, however, with an obvious love of railroading, and of the man the book is about.
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Title: The Engine Driver's Manual: How to Prepare, Fire and Drive a Steam Locomotive by Brian Topping ISBN: 0860935396 Publisher: Haynes Publishing Pub. Date: 15 November, 1999 List Price(USD): $34.95 |
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Title: Traveling the Pennsylvania Railroad: The Photographs of William H. Rau by William Herman Rau, John C. Van Horne, Eileen E. Drelick, Kenneth Finkel, Mary Panzer, John R. Stilgoe ISBN: 0812236254 Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press Pub. Date: 10 March, 2002 List Price(USD): $49.95 |
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Title: The Pennsylvania Railroad Under Wire by William D. Middleton ISBN: 0890246173 Publisher: Kalmbach Publishing Company Pub. Date: November, 2002 List Price(USD): $21.95 |
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Title: Railroads of Pennsylvania: Fragments of the Past in the Keystone Landscape by Lorett Treese ISBN: 0811726223 Publisher: Stackpole Books Pub. Date: March, 2003 List Price(USD): $18.95 |
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Title: Rails Under the Mighty Hudson: The Story of the Hudson Tubes, the Pennsy Tunnels and Manhattan Trans Fer by Brian J. Cudahy ISBN: 0823221903 Publisher: Fordham University Press Pub. Date: June, 2002 List Price(USD): $20.00 |
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