- Related Articles
- IRON AGE ADS
- Parr for the Course
- IRON AGE ADS
Steam 101
Making the grade at the University of Rollag's College of Steam Traction Engineering
By Bill Vossler
As the steam traction engines move forward, driven by newly-minted graduates of the steam engine school, walkers suddenly fling gallon jugs of water underneath the machines, simulating a fallen person. "The trick is that the fellow who is running the engine," says Dr. Gerald "Gerry" Gysler Parker, founder of the school, "is supposed to stop before they run over this 'person', which provides a very exciting time. Sometimes we run over these 'people', and sometimes we don't."
But classes at the annual two-day University of Rollag (Minn.) College of Steam Traction Engineering are not a lark, as any of the students or the instructors will tell you. "The course does two things," says Gerry, a dentist in Casselton, N.D. and licensed steam engineer. "Safety and the good operating techniques that make the operation of the machinery completely safe - the maintenance of water level and that sort of thing. Then there's the efficient operation of the machine, so you can start it, stop it without jerking, back it into a belt, or back it up to something to hook it up to. Both the safety part and the operating part are important areas of our classes."
Fifty-eight-year-old Gerry became interested in steam when he was 10 years old. "My grandfather, Albert Gysler, was born in 1879, and started running steam engines when he was 16 years old. We used to talk a lot about steam engines, and I was just fascinated by it. So from that time until the time he died (when I was 22), whenever we got together all we talked about was steam. That was how my interest started."
His first contact was not a positive one. "At my first show in 1958, I walked up to an engine and asked an older gentleman - all the gentlemen then were older who were running these engines - if I would be able to ride with him in the parade. He looked at me as though I had insulted him. I walked away thinking I didn't want to ask anybody anymore. That was the way things were ran when I was first around there: if you were young, it was hard to break into the business."
So Gerry broke in by himself, so to speak. As he became more and more knowledgeable and more and more involved, he decided that other people might want to learn about steam traction engines. In 1981 he decided to offer an evening workshop on steam. It went well enough that he decided to do more.
He hooked up with high school teacher Tom Hall of Moorhead, Minn., the other main instructor in the college, and together they decided to make it a two-day weekend school. "We decided he would teach part, and I would teach the other part," Gerry says. "At first, we would do it every couple of years, or whenever we felt like it, but it just grew and grew, and now it's grown to the point where we have a demand every year, and we have to do it."
Classes run about 70 students a year, from every state and province, and one from England so far. The 2001 class was the 21st.
Licensed steam engineer Tom Hall says his background is railroading (for one day each year during the Rollag show, he is engineer on Locomotive 353 and runs it up and down the tracks, hauling people on its 2 1/4-mile track around Gunderson Lake from station to station during each September's threshers' reunion), and stationary steam engineering.
The class has evolved over the years. "When we first started," Tom Hall says, "it was strictly a lecture course, simply because that was the best we could do." In fact, the course was held at Larson Welding in Fargo, N.D., with nary a steam engine in sight. However, the next year the class was moved to the 250-acre Western Minnesota Steam Threshers' Reunion (WMSTR) grounds near Rollag, Minn. It remained a lecture session only, at the time.