In the northeast corner of Griffith Park, Travel Town Museum is a love letter to the age of steam – and a paradise for train-obsessed kids. Run by the Los Angeles Department of Recreation and Parks since 1952, this free outdoor museum lets families walk among giant steam locomotives, passenger cars and cabooses that once crossed the West, and climb aboard several of them.
A miniature train circles the grounds for rides, volunteers keep the railroad stories coming, and birthday parties in a real passenger car are the stuff of local legend. Shaded picnic lawns and the park all around make it an easy half-day: big iron, bigger imaginations and the happy clang of railroad history.
