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.
