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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.
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!
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
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