Having a one-track mind helps when it comes to visiting this museum.

In the heyday of railroading, no trains stopped in Lomita.

So what is that quaint little green-and-yellow Victorian railroad station doing at the corner of 250th Street and Woodward Avenue?

You can thank the late Irene Lewis for it. The longtime railroad enthusiast, who died last year at the age of 91, had the station built as the focal point of the Lomita Railroad Museum that opened in 1967. She donated it to the city.

Her late husband, Martin, had been a locomotive engineer, and the museum--which was inspired by one she had visited in Denver--was Lewis’ tribute to him and to what she once called “the era when the genius of man and the power of steam worked together in molding an unparalleled nation.”

With its collection of railroad cars and memorabilia ranging from conductors’ uniform buttons to heavy bells that tolled from train engines, the museum recalls days when a conductor waved his lantern, the engine’s whistle gave a couple of blasts and the train pulled away with a series of chugs issuing from blasts of steam.

Indeed, the museum’s prize 1902 Southern Pacific locomotive looks as if it is about to pull away on the track next to the station. There’s even the recorded sound of a train whistle and the hearty call of “Aaaall aboooard.”

“People have never outgrown the train,” said Alice Abbott, who has managed the museum for 15 years. “It brings back happy memories for older people, and kids just love to hear the sound of a moving engine. Little kids like to play cowboys and Indians with the trains.”

The compact museum is a lesson in how to cram a lot of history into a small amount of space. The depot was modeled after a station that, until just a few years ago, stood in Wakefield, Mass.

Outside the building, the majestic locomotive--which was saved from a Terminal Island scrap yard and restored--is kept company by a 1910 Union Pacific caboose, a weathered wooden baggage wagon and a three-wheel 1881 yellow handcar that used to zip track inspectors along at up to 15 m.p.h.

A storage building has been dolled up with a false front and painted to look like a Railroad Express Agency office. And in a small park across the street, visitors can take in a 1913 boxcar and a 1923 oil tank car that came from Anchorage, Alaska. Rounding out the museum are brick walkways with potted flowering plants and benches for relaxing.

Inside the depot, visitors can peruse vintage postcards and photographs of historic trains. They can ogle watches that railroaders used to keep to their schedules and enjoy a collection of large bells, headlights and whistles that once adorned locomotives.

There are posters advertising railway excursions, as well as wooden mileposts that once stood alongside the tracks and red and green signal lanterns.

Display cases show off glassware, china and silver serving pieces used on dining cars in the days when people enjoyed fine food served on linen-topped tables as the miles sped by.

There also is a framed menu of a lunch served to then-Soviet leader Nikita S. Khrushchev when he traveled on a special Southern Pacific train between Los Angeles and San Francisco on Sept. 20, 1959. It’s in both English and Russian, and caviar mingled with shrimp Creole are the bill of fare.

To find this much railroad history outside of Lomita, you have to go to Griffith Park’s Travel Town in Los Angeles or the Orange Empire Railroad Museum in Perris.

“We get 10,000 people a year,” said Abbott, adding that some tourists land at Los Angeles International Airport and head straight for Lomita. Recent signatures in the guest book include visitors from France, England and Australia. During the school year, droves of youngsters descend on the museum with their teachers.

People picnic in the museum’s park and some people have even been married amid the memories of railroading’s past. Said Abbott: “We had one wedding inside the caboose.”

What: Lomita Railroad Museum.

Where: West 250th Street at Woodward Avenue, Lomita.

When: Wednesday through Sunday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Admission: $1, adults; 50 cents, children and students.

Information: 326-6255.