The City of Los Angeles Harbor Department had two small locomotives destined for scrap that seemed to be suitable for this purpose.

These locomotives had worked at a quarry on Santa Catalina Island, California, carrying stone to be used building breakwaters for the Port of Los Angeles.

At that time, the steam locomotive era was drawing to a close, and Atkins found a good response.

[2] Travel Town was inaugurated on December 14, 1952, in an area used as an internment camp during World War II.

[3] The locomotives were accessible day and night until fencing was installed in 1955 to prevent vandals from breaking glass windows and gauges.

The locomotive was originally built for the Hetch Hetchy Railroad to haul material for building the dam that supplies drinking water to San Francisco.

Generally the seating in a combination car was second class, and was not as nicely furnished as a regular coach on the same train.

It was used for freight trains on AT&SF's Northern, Southern, Panhandle, Plains and Gulf Divisions, and was still in active service, before it was donated to the museum in 1953.

In 1962, it was moved to the McDonnell Douglas Naval Weapons Industrial Reserve Plant at Torrance, California, where it was used for additional 25 years.

It is unusual that two diesel engines are used to drive the electric DC generator from both sides, one with clockwise rotation and the other anticlockwise.

The locomotives hauled rock from a quarry to the shore of Catalina Island, but occasionally worked also on the main land.

Destined for the scrap yard, #31 was identified as a candidate for the museum's collection and was donated by the Los Angeles Harbor Authority along with #32 in 1953.

It was built for the City of Los Angeles by ALCO's Rogers Locomotive Works (builder's number 53115)[11] in 1914 and had a boiler pressure of 165 psi (11.4 bar).

[12] Tickets can be purchased to ride the Travel Town Railroad, a 16 in (406 mm) gauge miniature railway for two circles around the museum grounds.

Located behind a roll-up door in the main exhibit hall, the East Valley Lines Model Rail-Road N Gauge Club[55] operates their extensive layout.

The interior space formerly occupied by the fire apparatus collection became the new home for wooden narrow gauge railroad cars formerly used in the Owens Valley, 250 miles northeast of Los Angeles.

Two aircraft, the Airborne early warning and control Lockheed P2V-3 Neptune and Grumman F9F-2 Panther, were traded to a museum near Fresno, California in 1992.

A small rocket similar to the German V-1 flying bomb was transferred to Vandenberg Air Force Base.