August 16, 2015 - After a breakfast stop at Norm's, we headed off to today's adventure within Griffith Park in Los Angeles to see Walt Disney's Barn and the Los Angeles Live Steamers Railroad Museum. Walt's father was a railroad mechanic and his Uncle Michael Martin was a steam locomotive engineer. As a teenager in Missouri, Disney had a summer job selling newspapers, candy, fruit, and soda on the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railway. Walt loved the uniform, the trains, the candy, and the chance to see the country.
In 1950, Walt Disney built a 1/8th scale live-steam railroad at his residence at 355 N. Carolwood Drive in Holmby Hills, CA. He operated the "Carolwood Pacific Railroad" for family and friends until 1953 when he shifted his energies into creating Disneyland. The Carolwood Pacific Railroad center of operations was a quaint red barn that Walt built as a replica of a Disney family barn in Marceline, MO. The Carolwood barn served as his workshop and he spent many hours here building miniatures and model trains.
These are the original conceptual drawings for the "Casey Jr. Railroad."
There is memorabilia everywhere in the barn, as well as many historical documents. This is the property layout for the proposed Disneyland park in the middle of a citrus grove out in the boondocks of Anaheim.
This is one copy of Walt's prospectus of Disneyland that was used to solicit investors for the project.
This is one of Walt's "porkpie" hats, which was his favorite. His wife Lillian hated to see him wearing it.
In 1999, Walt Disney's family moved the barn that he called his "happy place" from his home to the Los Angeles Live Steamers Railroad Museum, of which Walt was a founding member. Every Sunday the museum is open to the public for their enjoyment in riding one of the many steam powered locomotive trains in their collection. We took a spin on one of these 1/8th scale powerhouses.
Before Walt built the "Carolwood Pacific Railroad," he had taken his young daughters to amusement parks. He said, "Saturday was always daddy's day. So I'd take them to the merry-go-round and different places and as I'd sit while they rode the merry-go-round, I felt that there should be something built where parents and children could have fun together." He wrote his ideas for a new type of theme park, originally called Mickey Mouse Park, to a friend, saying, "I just want it to look like nothing else in the world...and it should be surrounded by a train."
