It would be too easy to knock Travel Town because of the condition of the collection. It should, instead, be praised for providing shelter for much of the collection, for creating an attraction which excites young children to become train enthusiasts, and for continuing to crawl forward on a thread of a budget.

The locomotives at TT are almost universally in poor shape. Like many communities, Los Angeles saw the locomotive collection as park structures, and assumed the public would only take pride in the gifts. Instead, vagrants, thieves, and vandals, went to work removing gauges, plates, bells, whistles, lamps, and copper pipes. Now inside a fenced and protected environment, the locomotive could be addressed by volunteers and specialists, except for the lack of funding that could facilitate cosmetic restoration of the exhibits. Consider the collection in a state of suspended restoration. Hopefully, the city of L.A. will recognize their responsibility to the collection and start feeding funds into the park.
Worse, perhaps, than the steam locomotives, are the wooden coaches and freight cars, most of which could be brought back within a short period of time, with wood replacement. The SoCal climate and time, has devoured buffer beams and window sills.

Is the train shed a reproduction or a transplant from somewhere else?

I believe it is new, but perhaps another reader could check. BTW, there is no direct rail line connecting this park with a main line.

Thanks for posting the photos and information. It's not nearly as bad as it could be. I would love to see that Atlantic tearing down the mainline.

Mr. Glueck's comments are a hard thing to read, but I cannot disagree. To be fair, all the locomotives get routine lubrication and paint; track is maintained by volunteers; and additions are made to landscaping and artifacts (semaphores, signals, etc.) also by volunteers. As an occasional volunteer at Travel Town and a Los Angeles native, Travel Town is as important to me now as it was when I was six.

The train shed was constructed as new with architectural features to mimic those of famous passenger train sheds. It was a monumental effort on the part of the city and the volunteers to bring the shed to completion.

There are projects moving along. The AT&SF M-177 "Doodlebug" has an operating engine and generator now as well as many restored interior features. The SP-219, formerly numbered 20, is undergoing a slow rebuild to operation. I use the word rebuild as this is not a restoration in the formal sense. SP 219 was built by Baldwin in 1880 as an 0-4-2T steam dummy. Over the years it was cobbled into what it is today, a unique blend of components from the scrap pile. It was a featured locomotive at the dedication of Union Station in downtown Los Angeles.

Paul, I didn't want to give a false impression of TT. The most important thing about Travel Town is that somebody has made a start to reverse the neglect of years. I think regular painting, replacement or reproduction of steel parts, will make the biggest initial impression. If I lived on the left coast, my priority at TT would be the wood replacement where it is crumbling on the car collection. The fact is, volunteers are making a huge difference. Hopefully, in a decade, their impact will be far more visible.

Regarding the Atlantic, yeah, I don't believe we have an active 4-4-2 running in the USA. Say, four cars, at speed, cutting across New Mexico?

To follow on to what Paul just wrote, Travel Town always seems to be a popular place for railfans to dump on. It is painfully true that none of the artifacts have been maintained and protected as one would expect from a museum, but you have to remember, Travel Town wasn't seen so much as a museum as a playground when it was founded. If you had told the City back then that they would have had to put out the money to "preserve and protect" the artifacts, then I can promise you they would never have been accepted and would instead of been scrapped. It was a different philosophy then.

Even today, the City won't put money into "restoration" of the artifacts. That is almost exclusively done by the money raised by the volunteers. And as a 20 something year volunteer as an adult, we are peddling as fast as we can. We can always use more help and money.

But anyone who visits now having not seen it for 15-20 years is amazed at the difference. We obviously have the train shed (officially called the Locomotive Pavilion), new picnic areas, lots of new landscaping and other improvements done by the City. We have an operating EMC model 40, a Baldwin RS-12, an American Locomotive Crane, a Fairmont speeder and an almost operating ATSF Motorcar (doodlebug). We've installed a number of new artifacts such as a Sante Fe T-2 Semaphore, two SP lower quadrant semaphores, have just completed the restoration of a 1945 REA delivery truck, have painted a Navy flatcar, and SP boxcar and lots of other invisible work inside cars and elsewhere.

We have lots of track work underway. I'm currently supervising an Eagle Scout rebuilding of a turnout just outside of the train shed using donated composite ties. One of the images above just shows the temper fencing around the work area.

And as Paul inferred, he is the lead man for the rebuilding of the SP MW 219 (though none of us would complain if we saw him just a little bit more often... :) )

Not to mention we've been in lots of TV and movie work lately. Most notably we were featured in an episode of Ghost Whisperer. Of course it didn't help when in that show they use our correct name, and then said we have closed years ago. :-)

And our biggest claim for success, we host around 500,000 visitors a year. How many other rail venues can claim that?

Greg

As a native Angelino, Travel Town is dear to me as well. I was born in the San Fernando Valley and as a kid, my parents took me here often. I suspect this was the location of my initiation into the world of railroad enthusiasts and museums. It's an affliction I've carried with me since.

I still go there from time to time, a lot has changed since I was a kid. Before there was a shed and a bunch of parallel tracks, there were sections of disconnected panel track set down at odd angles with equipment stuffed and mounted on these sections, but unable to move.

Eventually, they reconfigured the tracks in a parallel "yard" fashion, and even later built the badly needed shed. Access to the equipment is nothing like to used to be. A good deal of cars and locomotives are inaccessible, for good reason I'm sure. But it's not as much fun today as it was years ago when you could go "play train" all day long and never run of of new things to climb on (much to my parent's chagrin I suppose). Still, I hope some day to take my boys to TT when they are a little older, and see if there is still enough magic to there bring out the "inner train fan" in each of them. I won't get my hopes up though.

One very disappointing experience I had with this group is a few years ago, a group of us Feather River Rail Society members who live in Southern California came up with the idea to gather up the volunteers and resources to perform a joint-venture type of cosmetic restoration on their Western Pacific caboose there to provide a local interpretive display commemorating the WP's centennial. It's a 1909 Haskell & Barker car, WP 769 (and former Sacramento Northern 1623). The car was donated to them as WP 754, which was a last minute switchola the WP did to give them a little better car without having to redo all the paperwork (AFEs, donation letters, and such). But the car is the WP 769 and it is in a pretty serious state of decay.

Anyway, we reached out to folks there who we thought were decision makers, or had access to them, with a proposal to provide labor, materials, and resources, with a plan and a timeline and all we wanted in return was some sort of signage acknowledging the cosmetic restoration was provided by the FRRS. The idea was to use the WP centennial (which was in 2009) to cross-promote our museum with others that housed WP equipment. We had the means to raise funds, obtain material, and labor, plus we have the builder's drawings and a lot of other historical research material for this series of cars available.

We never heard a response. Nothing. We finally gave up. The car has since rotten even further, and was recently closed off to visitors because the end platforms had rotted to a state of being unsafe to stand on.

We tried but now the opportunity has passed. I would have been proud to be a part of this project, but for whatever reason, our summary proposal fell on deaf ears. What a shame.

I visited the site three years ago, and was pleasantly suprised. The place has made great strides in terms of both preserving and interpreting what they have. Seems to have pretty a solid volunteer base nowadays as well. I imagine working with a city government is probably just as tedious as working with the Federal Government, but such is life.

On the other hand, if you folks ever want to sell the Dickson locomotive...

Dave Crosby

Travel Town was also featured in an episode of the 1960's TV show "Adam-12".

Travel Town as you might have expected has been a popular location for lots of movies and TV Shows. A lot of them can be viewed online at Hulu and other providers. A partial list is kept here.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Travel_tow ... s_in_Media

Greg

Also filmed at TT was a scene from episode 234 of The Andy Griffith Show. The episode, named "Aunt Bee's Cousin", first aired on December 4, 1967 and guest starred Jack Albertson as Aunt Bee's Cousin, Bradford J. Taylor.

Here's a pretty complete set of photos taken at Travel Town earlier this year:

http://www.trainweb.org/chris/travel.html

I posted this comment a long time ago, and everyone thought I must be mistaken, but I swear I remember it. Wasn't there a for television movie made in the early 1980's that featured the switcher Charlie Atkins? The plot was a bunch of retired people in a retirement home wanted to take charge of their life, so they stole the Charlie Atkins and went out onto the mainline on a last life adventure tour.

Did Travel Town have rail access 30 years ago?

I too grew up in the San Fernando Valley, graduating from Birmingham High School in 1970, and have early fond memories of trips to Travel Town. While the emphasis was on the trains, there was also a plane "China Lake" up at the northeast corner of the grounds and as I remember some other military vehicles (tank?). I remember that in the late 50's (maybe early 60's) there was actually a short ride for visitors that went 'out-n-back'.

In 1969, I did a 'multimedia' slide show for a high school photography class assignment, using Travel Town as the locale and a nine year-old Robes Patton (the late sports writer for the Miami Sun-Sentinel) as a kid wishing to be a train engineer. This was the time that everything was out in the open and lined up on parallel trackage.

Last visit was just as the pavilion was up and track was being finished on the interior (nothing was undercover, yet).

With what they have to work with (the bureaucracy included), it is definite progress and I applaud them.

sc 'doc' lewis