Travel Town Looks to the Future : Anniversary: The popular park marks its 40th year with proposals to turn the locomotive collection into a sophisticated historical museum.

It’s been 40 years since a city employee with a penchant for trains made a deal to have a retired Southern Pacific steam locomotive trucked into the northwest corner of Griffith Park, launching Travel Town.

Over the next six years, Charlie Atkins begged, wheedled and cajoled America’s railroads, mining companies, movie studios and aerospace firms to donate their obsolete equipment to the city instead of scrapping it. When he died in 1958, Atkins had created a travel-oriented amusement park that has been etched in the memories of countless Los Angeles youngsters.

And the lure has never faded.

Each year, about 350,000 people visit Travel Town’s attractions, which include 16 steam locomotives, numerous rail cars and dozens of Los Angeles Fire Department vehicles, along with a working mini-railroad.

Marking the popular park’s 40th anniversary, a photo exhibit documenting Atkins’ work is showing in the Los Angeles City Hall Rotunda. It will remain through July 17.

Yet today, as they celebrate Travel Town’s first 40 years, Los Angeles Park and Recreation officials are looking to the future with ambitious plans for change.

While pledging to maintain the attractions that give the park its appeal, they aim to shape the collection into a sophisticated historical museum.

“We have people today who came to Travel Town as children and are now starting to bring their grandchildren,” said Linda Barth, a city planner who is in charge of planning and development for the park. “And not only will these kids have rail cars to walk on, but they’ll be able to ride on them and at the same time learn about our own history.”

The plans focus on Travel Town’s once-underrated acquisitions, such as a 128-year-old steam locomotive that ran in Northern California and the 55-year-old “City of Los Angeles,” a one-of-a-kind, garishly decorated sleeper car fashioned after a Gold Rush-era bordello saloon.

In 1984, a consultant for the California State Railroad Museum hired to assess the park’s resources concluded that it had “the largest collection of standard and three-foot gauge steam locomotives west of St. Louis.”

It had the potential to become a first-rate museum if the city would invest in maintaining and promoting it, he said.

Park officials say that within five years, the collection will live up to that potential by becoming a major interpreter of the Southland’s colorful history.

“Railroad history and Los Angeles history are inextricably intertwined,” Barth said. “Almost everything L.A. is--the settlement pattern, the freeways, the suburbs--you can trace back to the railroads.”

Following a 1987 master plan for Travel Town’s preservation and expansion, officials have spent $250,000 to remove asbestos from much of the rail equipment and are about to complete a $1.7-million, 30,000-square-foot locomotive pavilion reminiscent of a turn-of-the-century train shed.

“Finally, we’re going to be able to get some of this stuff under cover,” Barth said. “One of the most dangerous things we do is leave the equipment out in the rain and sun. This will give us protection for the equipment and a marvelous showplace for some of our most valuable pieces.”

Other major plans include a 30,000-square-foot rail museum that could be built by 1996 with special parks assessment district funds if voters approve the measure in November.

Barth said the museum would cost several million dollars and would house permanent exhibit galleries, a library, offices, meeting rooms, one or two rail cars, and the valuable collection of L.A. City Fire Department equipment now on display in a metal shed.

But, Barth says, just as important as the large expenditures are the hours of time and money donated by area railroad buffs.

In past years, about 150 volunteers have helped officials restore many of the once-deteriorating engines and rail cars, start an education program for visiting school children and create a permanent exhibit of L.A. City Fire equipment.

As a one-year research project, the volunteers also created the pictorial history now on display in City Hall. It traces that section of Griffith Park to the 1930s through stages as alfalfa farm, an LAPD prison farm, a home for the Civilian Conservation Corps, a U.S. Army prisoner-of-war camp and then development as Travel Town.

Volunteers have begun the time-consuming task of manually replacing old track so that the park can again have an operating life-size rail line similar to one that ran through Travel Town in its early years.