Travelogue: Travel Town, Los Angeles
Discover a subversive showcase of machines made of iron and steel on a patch of land in Southern California
Discover a subversive showcase of iron and steel machines on nine acres within America’s largest contiguous public city park. I’m referring to the land in Griffith Park—inside Southern California’s city of angels—known as Travel Town. Coal, steam and diesel-powered locomotives with freight, passenger and other railroad cars occupy much of the property, which runs parallel to a freeway along the Los Angeles River.
The museum and grounds were conceived during Los Angeles’s historic post-World War 2 boom when ideas about unabashedly celebrating the manmade were more realistically imaginable, conceivable and possible. Travel Town began with a papier-mâché model of a place where covered wagons, military planes, passenger trains and motor cars could be experienced, studied and beloved in public. Government commissioners were persuaded to build it.
Remarkably, Travel Town still exists. Union Pacific dispatched railroad men to lay the display tracks. Los Angeles sponsored a dedication ceremony. A schoolchildren’s tour began. A diesel switcher donated by the McDonnell-Douglas Corporation operated under its own power for the first time since its flames burned out in 1961. A petroleum field firetruck was donated by the Shell Oil Company. These acts happened.
As I recently parked and waited to enter Travel Town’s gates—with free parking and admission—I didn’t know what to expect. Within minutes, I was walking around locomotives, fascinated by various engines, histories and functions of trains, routes and machinery. A small shop is integral to the museum, serving as a makeshift knowledge and resource center where an intelligent cashier answered questions like a docent, guiding me to books, sources and facts that would impress a railroad scholar—if there could be such a scholar in 21st century America.
The cashier sought to satisfy my curiosity, referring me to another Travel Town volunteer—volunteers are mostly older engineers, machinists and railroad enthusiasts or their wives—who promptly deviated from orthodoxy, providing an unscheduled tour inside a sleeping car manufactured by the Pullman Company. The unsolicited tour reminded me to appreciate the individual who worships the manmade.
Such men and women happily inhabit rusty Travel Town, which features the 70-ton Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe number 664 (built by Baldwin in 1899), which was donated by the Santa Fe Railroad in 1953. Other locomotives include those charitably donated by Hawaiian railroads, Union Pacific and a lumber company.
According to Travel Town’s original 1952 press release, credit for the idea which evolved into Travel Town goes to the city’s superintendent of recreation, William Frederickson Jr., who realized in 1947 that many “youngsters had never been close enough to climb into an airplane and [able to] get a look at the pilot’s cockpit and its myriad of controls and gauges. This was at a time when the federal government was disposing of large amounts of surplus war material,” the press release asserts, so Frederickson sought to obtain a surplus plane to exhibit at one of Los Angeles’ municipal playgrounds.
LA’s park bosses “allocated $700 for the purchase of seven planes which were stored in the Middle West. But by the time the necessary purchase orders had been properly channeled, the aircraft were unavailable.” The project was dormant for several years until, in late September of 1952, the department assigned an enthusiastic maintenance worker named Charley Atkins the task of writing to D.J. Russell, then the president of the Southern Pacific Company, and inquire whether “the railroad company might be willing to donate an obsolete locomotive to the display. Russell heartily approved the donation and directed his staff to have Engine 3025 prepared for its emergence from ‘retirement’ and its appearance as an honored exhibit at Travel Town.”
Moving “the gallant, oil-burning chugger” to Travel Town was the next challenge. Enter the Belyea Truck Company, which agreed to transport the engine. On October 10, 1952—the date the locomotive-themed Atlas Shrugged would be published by Random House five years later—Travel Town’s first exhibit, Southern Pacific’s engine, arrived. As the city put it: “The giant locomotive and its 25 1/2 ton tender…now stands on a strip of track at Travel Town, and visitors may enter the engine’s cab, examine the controls, and tug the cord which clangs its big brass bell.”
Soon, Travel Town received new vehicles for other exhibits. Among the gifts:
A 44-passenger Los Angeles Transit Lines streetcar
A 76-year old dray from Paul J. Smith, president of the Republic Van and Storage Company
A 50-year-old kerosene tank wagon, donated by the Standard Oil Company of California
A colorful old circus wagon, given by the Beverly Amusement Company
Caboose No 2117, a veteran “home on wheels” for nomadic trainmen, from the Union Pacific Railroad Company
A one-horse shay from Knott’s Berry Farm
The Pacific Electric Company donated an old Sierra Vista waiting station, which had sheltered commuters for decades
With this series of exhibits “cleaned and polished for the occasion,” Travel Town was officially dedicated on Sunday, December 14, 1952. The railroad enthusiast and Los Angeles recreation and parks employee whose letter convinced a railroad businessman to act in charity for history and education, Charley Atkins, deserves credit for the train-themed vision for which Travel Town became known.
Principally, it was Charley Atkins who campaigned to procure donated traveling machines that made the indoor and outdoor property “a haven for retired steam engines and interesting old railroad cars and for any other antique transportation equipment that might be donated,” as the brochure I picked up in the shop states.
Travel Town’s definitive history book, Travel Town Museum: A Window to the Railroad Heritage of the American West, reports that Atkins relentlessly corresponded, lobbying Vice-President Nixon for equipment from the Panama Canal. Atkins wrote to every railroad, whether transcontinental or short line, narrow or standard gauge, in the West (and many in the Midwest, South and East) requesting cars, locomotives and china. He pleaded with Detroit’s car companies as well as Southern California’s aerospace firms and movie studios for wagons, boats, cars and railroad machines.
The Mormon church was asked for wagons. Coca-Cola was asked to donate a scale train. Charley Atkins, who never tired of seeking to preserve manmade transportation, died of a heart attack at Travel Town six years after it opened. It doesn’t strike me as a stretch to say that Charley Atkins died doing work he loved. That he died while being productive in the place he’d re-imagined, diligently pursued and worked to move—and keep powering—into reality makes Travel Town itself something of a memorial to the one who worships machines made by man.
The original cost of Travel Town’s construction and first year’s operating budget were $39,927. By 1965, the budget to renovate and build an exhibit building was $265,000. That first year’s revenue from trolley ride operations was $20,915 and 25 cents.
Travel Town’s history book recaptures its earliest promise:
Finger a throttle on one of Travel Town’s still locomotives, watch a volunteer workman spike rail, pass quietly through a caboose or passenger car…within the Travel Town collection, one can begin to grasp the all-encompassing spectrum of railroading and the scope of its influence on the history and people of the 19th and 20th centuries.… Railroad equipment ranges from luxury lounge cars to daycoach passenger service, inter-urban transport to transcontinental travel and from logging locomotives that worked in the Sierra Nevadas to the worker locomotives that helped build immense projects like that Hetch Hetchy dam and Los Angeles harbor constructions.
Travel Town’s official book details the Whyte wheel classification system for steam locomotives, developed by mechanical engineer F.M. Whyte, who suggested a method of classifying steam locomotives by the number of wheels they had. This system came into use early in the 20th century. It’s apparently still common terminology today.
Of course, I learned about oil on my visit to Travel Town. “In 1893,” goes the report, “Charles Canfield and Edward Doheny mined a new kind of oil in La Brea tar pits, an oil different than the type used to make kerosene. Since there was no established need for this new thick type of oil, a market needed to be created. Doheny introduced the oil as fuel for sugar refineries, as asphalt for paving streets, and as fuel for steam ships. Other important uses for oil were created by Lymen Stewart, an oil promoter for the Union Oil company.”
Apparently, Mr. Stewart also developed an oil burner which ran the drilling rigs that dug for oil. The idea was streamlined when he invented a method to use oil as fuel in a locomotive boiler in 1894. He approached the Santa Fe Railway, which gave him an old locomotive with which to experiment. The first attempt failed, so he created an oil burner that enabled locomotive number 10 to climb up the long, steep Cajon Pass.
The rest of the story’s a lesson in capitalism, energy and U.S. industrial history:
Other engines were converted to oil. Southern Pacific, [which] had at first refused Stewart’s idea, copied his invention and converted their engines. Santa Fe copied Stewart’s device on more of their locomotives and then purchased their oil from Union Oil’s cheaper competitors. Santa Fe made a deal with Doheny and Canfield by which the railway would buy all the oil Doheny and Canfield could produce for one dollar a barrel. Eventually, the railroads began their own petroleum operations and supplied their trains with their own oil. As coal prices increased in the [W]est, it was less costly, more efficient and cleaner for [W]estern railroads to operate on oil. By 1909, the railroads were consuming 20 million barrels of oil per year to operate their locomotives.
Today, a miniature railroad ride cruises Travel Town every day. Model railroads run on weekends. Nearly every artifact is over 75 years old. While the airplanes were vacated, the locomotives, railroad cars, wagons, cars and trucks and other equipment remain. Future plans, to be partly funded by private donations, include a pavilion to protect the collection from weather, an exhibit and research center and a full-scale, two-mile demonstration railroad to a local zoo and a museum of America’s West.
This compact little train, transportation and American industrial outpost known as Travel Town Museum—at 5200 Zoo Drive in Los Angeles, CA 90027 (Tel: (323) 662-5874; visit the website)—is located near the Los Angeles Zoo, the Autry Museum of the American West and LA’s Equestrian Center in proximity to Warner Bros. and Walt Disney Studios in the eastern San Fernando Valley. April through October hours are: Monday through Friday 10AM to 5PM; Saturday through Sunday and holidays 10AM to 6PM. From November through March, hours are: Monday through Friday 10AM to 4PM; Saturday Sunday and holidays 10AM to 5PM.
Go by yourself, or with a friend, as I did, or bring the family, grandpa and the kids and don’t expect officious, unwelcoming, pompous lectures and solicitations for causes you don’t care about. Travel Town’s a place to learn, explore and experience the power of what it takes to move the world. Have at it while you can and, if you’re able and if you dare, climb aboard.
Travelogues
I just love these pieces written by someone who so obviously reveres the improvements made to all our lives by literally thousands of bright, enterprising people pursuing their own dreams. I will never understand so many people today who revile such things while at the same time constantly benefiting from them and other man-made wonders. Thank you for making me aware of such a wonderful place.