Travel Town Museum

Tucked into the northwest corner of Griffith Park, Travel Town opened in nineteen fifty-two as an outdoor railroad museum like no other in Los Angeles. The idea was pushed by city recreation officials, and Charley Atkins, a parks department employee, wrote to Southern Pacific asking for an old locomotive that children could climb aboard rather than peer at behind ropes. The City of Los Angeles accepted donations of aging steam engines and freight cars from railroads eager to shed old equipment.

By the mid-nineteen fifties the grounds held more than a dozen locomotives spanning the golden age of American steam, including Southern Pacific engine thirty twenty-five, an oil-burning steam locomotive that once pulled presidential specials. Generations of Angelenos have measured childhood by the ride on the small-gauge train that loops the property. Admission remains free, a deliberate policy set at the museum's founding and honored ever since.