Ronald DeGraw was born on December 7, 1942. His father was a motorman for the Philadelphia & Western Railroad, an electric traction line running between Upper Darby and Norristown, Pa., that was later merged into the Philadelphia Suburban Transportation Company (PSTC). The PSTC operated a network of trolleys and buses that fanned out through the western suburbs from the terminus of the Market Street Subway-Elevated Line at 69th Street in Upper Darby. Six other family members had worked for the P&W since 1909. Between 1965 and 1970, Degraw was a reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer, often covering the transit system at a time when it was moving from private to public ownership.

DeGraw was hired by the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority (SEPTA) in 1970 as Director of Development of its Red Arrow Division, acquired that year by condemnation from the Philadelphia Suburban Transportation Company. He was promoted to Senior Project Engineer in 1976, when SEPTA took over the Schuylkill Valley Lines, Inc., operating buses in the farther suburbs along the Schuylkill River, as its Frontier Division. DeGraw was subsequently Manager of Route and Service Planning for the suburban transit lines (1980-1984), Chief Operations Planning Officer (1984-1987), Chief Operating Officer of the Suburban Transit Division (1987-?), and Chief of Long-Range Planning for SEPTA. DeGraw retired from SEPTA in 1996, and thereafter worked as an independent transportation consultant from his home in King of Prussia.

DeGraw maintained throughout his life a deep interest in the history of the company for which three generations of his family had worked and its place in the suburban communities where he lived. He was the author of three books. The first, Red Arrow, was published in 1972. He then worked on an updated and expanded version of the original work that was planned to encompass three volumes. The first, Red Arrow: The First Hundred Years, 1848-1948, was published in 1985. The second, Pig & Whistle: The Story of the Philadelphia & Western Railway, was published posthumously in 2007. DeGraw never finished the third volume that would have covered the lines' history after 1948, and he was collecting material for a fourth volume on the history of the Lehigh Valley Transit Company when he died on January 30, 2006.