Why you should experience Travel Town Museum in Los Angeles, California.
Travel Town Museum is an open-air transportation museum where Griffith Park's recreational character meets historic locomotives, railroad technology and the machinery that connected Southern California with the wider American West.
Set along Zoo Drive near Forest Lawn Drive and just steps from the northwestern reaches of Griffith Park, the museum occupies a broad outdoor site where full-size locomotives and railcars stand against wooded hills at the park's interior edge. Parallel tracks organize much of the grounds, placing steam engines, passenger cars, cabooses and specialized equipment in long sequences whose immense wheels, boilers and undercarriages remain visible at close range. Moving among the equipment shifts the encounter repeatedly between track level and elevated locomotive cabs, exposing machinery conceived for freight, passenger service, switching and industrial work across radically different railroad environments. Smaller structures and indoor exhibit areas deepen the setting beyond the rolling stock, giving the collection the physical character of a compact rail yard distributed across open parkland. The result is a transportation museum whose outdoor scale places the engineering of historic railroading directly within Griffith Park's expansive recreational landscape.
What you should know about Travel Town Museum.
Travel Town Museum is best known for preserving a substantial collection of historic railroad equipment through a project launched as the steam-locomotive era was disappearing from American railroads. Los Angeles Recreation and Parks employee Charley Atkins developed the concept during the late 1940s with fellow rail enthusiasts, initially envisioning a “railroad petting zoo” where children would climb aboard retired machinery and imagine themselves as engineers. Department general manager George Hjelte and superintendent of recreation William Frederickson supported the effort, and Atkins contacted major California railroads as dieselization placed increasing numbers of steam locomotives beyond active service. Southern Pacific president D. J. Russell responded by donating locomotive 3025, a 115-ton 4-4-2 Atlantic built by the American Locomotive Company's Schenectady Works in 1904. The Los Angeles Harbor Department supplied two compact switching locomotives, Union Pacific contributed caboose 2117 and Pacific Electric provided the Sierra Vista waiting station, rapidly expanding the project beyond its initial conception. Standard Oil of California added a kerosene tank wagon, Knott's Berry Farm contributed a one-horse shay and other donors broadened the display beyond rail equipment during the museum's formative period. Travel Town was formally dedicated on December 14, 1952, establishing a municipal transportation collection on nine acres of Griffith Park. Atkins died in 1959, yet the institution he initiated continued expanding, with its exhibits reorganized and the property rededicated in 1965 as the collection increasingly concentrated on railroad history and Southern California's development through rail transportation.
The locomotive collection preserves a technological chronology extending from nineteenth-century steam power into diesel operation through machines built for substantially different forms of railroad work. Stockton Terminal & Eastern 1, constructed by Norris-Lancaster in 1864, survives as a 33-ton 4-4-0 American-type locomotive and entered the museum in 1953. A Baldwin locomotive built in 1880 began as a disguised steam motor for San Francisco street-railway service, later worked for Southern Pacific in Southern California, appeared as a fictional Cahuenga Valley Railroad engine during the 1939 opening festivities for Los Angeles Union Passenger Terminal and entered Travel Town in 1954 through the Railway & Locomotive Historical Society's Southern California Chapter. Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe 664, built by Baldwin in 1899, represents the heavier 2-8-0 Consolidation configuration used for freight service and joined the collection in 1953. Geared locomotives preserve another engineering branch: the 65-ton Camino, Placerville & Lake Tahoe 2 was built by Lima in 1922 as a three-truck Shay for steep industrial railroad work and arrived through the Michigan-California Lumber Company in 1955. Western Pacific 26, an American Locomotive Company 2-8-0 weighing 119 tons, entered the collection in 1954 after a career beginning in 1909. Travel Town 52, built by Electro-Motive Corporation in 1941 and donated by McDonnell-Douglas in 1988, carries the collection into diesel technology through a 300-horsepower industrial locomotive. More than forty historic locomotives and cars now occupy the museum, allowing successive generations of railroad engineering to be examined through surviving machines whose individual careers crossed street railways, lumber operations, freight systems, passenger lines and industrial facilities.
How to fold Travel Town Museum into your trip.
Travel Town Museum works as the anchor for a Griffith Park sequence tracing miniature railroad engineering, Depression-era zoological construction and historic amusement technology across three distinctive forms of public recreation.
Begin at Los Angeles Live Steamers Railroad Museum, founded in 1956 after local model engineers gathered to create a live-steam club beside the recently established transportation museum. 35 participants became founding members that September, and early construction produced steaming bays and an 800-foot inner railroad before an eastern expansion added 1,100-foot loops in 1959. The property now spans 13 acres with 24,600 feet of ground track across three gauges, much of it built by members along with tunnels, bridges, switches, stations, control towers and miniature towns. Walt Disney belonged to the organization, and his surviving Carolwood Barn, originally the workshop beside his Holmby Hills backyard railroad, now stands among its historic exhibits. Continue to Old Los Angeles Zoo, where the city opened a twelve-acre Griffith Park zoological facility in 1912 with an initial population of fifteen animals after abandoning the cramped conditions of its earlier Eastlake Park operation. Works Progress Administration labor dramatically reshaped the property during the Depression, constructing seven animal grottoes, four elk and deer paddocks and five heated cat cages alongside broader improvements to the grounds. The zoo closed in 1966 when its animals transferred to the new Los Angeles Zoo, leaving stone walls, caves and enclosures embedded in the park as physical remnants of an earlier philosophy of animal exhibition. Conclude at Griffith Park Merry-Go-Round, built by Spillman Engineering Corporation in 1926 and relocated from San Diego to Griffith Park in 1937. Its four-abreast platform carries 68 wood-carved, bejeweled horses representing Looff, Spillman and Carmel traditions, joined by two chariots and an elaborately decorated ceiling assembly. A Stinson 165 Military Band Organ holds a repertoire exceeding 1,500 selections, giving the carousel an unusually substantial musical component. Walt Disney regularly watched his daughters ride there, and the carousel became closely associated with the period in which he developed his ambitions for a new kind of amusement park. The progression moves from member-built miniature rail technology through surviving WPA zoo construction into a rare Spillman carousel connected with Walt Disney, tracing three distinct ways Griffith Park turned engineering, public recreation and mechanical entertainment into enduring civic institutions.
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