Robert Paul Turcic passed away in June 2025. A model railroader formerly from Hooper, Utah, he shot mostly detail and roster shots of locomotives and freight cars for reference in building scale models. His photo collection was salvaged by Parker Christensen who donated it to the WCRM for digitization.
Active in the 1990s through the 2010s, he signed all of his photos as “Paul Turcic” so the collection is labeled as such. He focused on the dwindling Denver & Rio Grande Western and Southern Pacific locomotive fleets after the 1996 Union Pacific-Southern Pacific merger, as well as Utah shortlines like the Salt Lake City Southern, Utah Railway, and Utah Central Railway.
The collection can be viewed on the museum’s Flickr page HERE.
Two Southern Pacific freight trains meet at Lemay, Utah, on the Lucin Cutoff causeway in April 1980. Doug Harrop photograph, Western Crossroads Railway Museum collection.
The Western Crossroads Railway Museum is pleased to announce that we have received a donation of Doug Harrop’s black and white photographs from his son, Matt Harrop.
Doug Harrop was born in Huntsville, Utah, in 1940. He hired on to the Southern Pacific Railroad in Tucson, Arizona with the intention of becoming an executive in 1967. He graduated from SP’s management training program in 1968, entering professional service as assistant trainmaster to Trainmaster Larry Dubois in Bakersfield, California. After a decade of this work ending in San Francisco, California, he resigned from management and entered road service as a locomotive engineer based out of Ogden Utah in 1977. He stayed through the merger and retired from Union Pacific in 2003. He passed away on 24 March 2014.
The earliest photographs in this collection date to 1961, when Doug was serving a full time mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the upper New England region of the United States and Canada. There is a gap in his black and white photography while in California, at which time he apparently shot exclusively color slides. When he returned to Utah he resumed black and white photography, continuing with it long after his peers had switched to full color into the early 2000s.
Doug was a prolific author and many of these photographs have appeared in Trains Magazine, CTC Board, Pacific Rail News, Railfan & Railroad, John Signor’s books, and other publications, either to illustrate his own articles or to accompany articles written by others.
We are scanning the photographs and uploading them to the museum’s Flickr account.
A Union Pacific switch locomotive assembles the Desert Wind and Pioneer passenger trains on the night of May 15, 1983 at the Ogden Union Station. Doug Harrop photo, Western Crossroads Railway Museum collection.
In November and December 2023 we collaborated with the Peteetneet School Museum of Payson, Utah, and the South County O Scalers club to install a popup exhibit of Western Crossroads Railway Museum artifacts and photographs during the holiday railroad exhibit. We selected a set of materials relating to the Salt Lake & Utah Railroad (an electric interurban railroad) and the Denver & Rio Grande Western’s Tintic Branch, both of which played an important part in Payson’s history.
Salt Lake & Utah Railroad timetables and tickets from the Western Crossroads Railway Museum exhibited at the Peteetneet School Museum in December 2023.
The exhibit was taken down on December 28 2023, although we look forward to future opportunities to collaborate with communities and show off our collections to the public.
We are pleased to announce that we recently received the donation of the H.L. Putnam Collection. Henry Lee Putnam was a machinist for the Denver & Rio Grande and Denver & Rio Grande Western railroads in Helper and Soldier Summit during the brief time that the terminal facilities were moved there. He retired in 1955. The collection was donated by his grandson David Putnam, to whom we are indebted for making these materials available.
The collection consists of H.L. Putnam’s training books on steam technology, 29 issues of the railroad’s employee magazine The Green Light, and three issues of Trains Magazine relating to Utah, including the May 1969 Golden Spike Centennial issue.
We have already begun digitizing portions of the collection, which can be found on our Archive.org page.
The museum had a table at the Evanston Roundhouse Festival on August 6 2022. We would like to welcome the new member who signed up at this show! Thank you to everybody who helped man the table.
The museum table inside the roundhouse in Evanston, Wyoming. Displayed is a Utah Railway vellum right of way map depicting Gordon Creek Trestle, the tallest railroad bridge in the state of Utah.
We want to thank Don Strack who donated a piece of Central Pacific rail to the museum collection. We are unsure of its provenance, but the size is typical of replacement rails laid in the 1870s.
We are pleased to announce that we have received a $1,000 grant from the Rocky Mountain Railroad Historical Foundation to fund the digitization of the large format documents in the John West Collection of Utah Railway Engineering Maps and the John W. Timberlake Collection of Denver & Rio Grande Western Railroad Operations Documents. The small-format documents from these collections have been digitized by our volunteers using standard size scanners, but the maps and blueprints that are too big to fit on the flatbed scanner (one map is approximately 40 feet long!) need to be contracted out to a scanning service. This grant will assist with this process so that these invaluable documents can be made available to the public on our archive.org account.
We are one of six organizations that received grants from the RMRHF this year, and wish our fellow preservation societies luck in their projects! You can read more about this year’s grants in the Rocky Mountain Railroad Club June 2022 newsletter found on their website HERE. Thank you to the Rocky Mountain Railroad Club and the Rocky Mountain Railroad Historical Foundation for supporting us!
A portion of the John West Utah Railway Engineering Maps Collection which will be digitized with this grant.A section of the engineering drawings for the Denver & Rio Grande Western overpass in Springville, Utah, from the John West Collection of Utah Railway Engineering Maps, which will be digitized with this grant.
To close out our first year of operations, the Western Crossroads Railway museum uploaded the first of three parts of a unique document bundle from the John E. Timberlake Denver & Rio Grande Western Operations Papers collection. One of many files saved by Timberlake, the Rio Grande’s Director of Unit Train Operations, this stack of loose sheets chronicles the first 21 years of the tenuous relationship between the D&RG and the Utah Railway. Containing hundreds of letters, telegrams, maps, newspaper clippings, and financial reports, it provides insight into the politics and panic surrounding competing railroad companies in the years leading up to the Great Depression.
Part 1 of this collection can be read at our archive.org account here: D&RG – Utah Railway Trackage Agreement Papers Part 1 Parts 2 and 3 will be uploaded early 2022. Other files from the Timberlake collection are in the process of digitization and will be made available as soon as complete.
The acquisition and digitization of this document stack was made possible through a generous donation from Mark W. Hemphill. Approximately 14 hours of scanning and 5.5 hours to assemble the pdfs went into this project.
Thanks to Utah Railroad Sightseeing, the Western Crossroads Railway Museum was gifted a space at the Intermountain Train Expo in Farmington Utah on Saturday November 6 2021. This was the first public presence of the museum at an event, and was highly productive. We displayed one of the original vellum property maps from the John West Collection of Utah Railway Engineering Documents, which drew a lot of attention.
We are taking memberships; all dues support the preservation, digitization, and acquisition of our collections! Find out more here: Member Information
