Near the Gulf Coast in Silverhill, Wales West runs a Welsh-style 2 foot narrow gauge steam railway and a 7.5 inch grand scale line beside its RV resort, with Pumpkin Patch, Christmas and Easter trains.

The Oregon Coast Scenic Railroad runs historic steam and diesel trains along the Tillamook Coast from Garibaldi, Rockaway Beach and Wheeler, preserving the logging railroads of the Pacific Northwest.

From Hyannis and Buzzards Bay, the Cape Cod Central Railroad runs narrated excursions, brunch and dinner trains and THE POLAR EXPRESS Train Ride over 27 miles of former New Haven track.

In Roanoke's restored Norfolk & Western passenger station, the O. Winston Link Museum shows the photographer's black-and-white record of the last years of steam on the N&W and the towns along its tracks.

In South Norwalk, the SoNo Switch Tower Museum lets visitors throw the Armstrong levers in New Haven Railroad Signal Station 44, an 1896 tower that guided trains for 88 years.

The Phillipsburg Railroad Historians, a volunteer nonprofit founded in 1990, open their railroad museum, library and miniature train rides on select spring and summer weekends in Phillipsburg.

Minnesota's train museums run from a working 1907 roundhouse in St. Paul to an indoor rail yard under Duluth's depot, with streetcar rides, caboose trains and a hand-turned turntable in Currie.

Free to enter and housed in Council Bluffs' 1904 Carnegie Library, the Union Pacific Railroad Museum tells 150 years of Union Pacific and American West history, with a train simulator upstairs.

The Everett Railroad, a working freight shortline since 1954, runs steam and diesel excursions from Hollidaysburg into Morrison's Cove in 1920s coaches, with pumpkin, foliage and Santa trains.

A family guide to 11 Missouri train museums and rides, from Union Pacific's Big Boy in St. Louis County and live steam in Glencoe to Frisco history in Springfield and dome cars out of Branson.

Down two flights of stairs in Downtown Brooklyn, the New York Transit Museum fills the old Court Street subway station with vintage subway and elevated cars that families can walk right into.

West of Altoona, the Horseshoe Curve has carried trains around the Allegheny front since 1854. Visitors ride a funicular or climb the stairs to watch trains swing around the bend from a trackside overlook.

At Raleigh's Pullen Park, the fifth-oldest operating amusement park in the country, a one-third-size miniature train loops through the park, and each winter it becomes the Holiday Express.

Volunteers at San Antonio's Texas Transportation Museum run the Longhorn and Western Railroad around the grounds, plus model train layouts, vintage cars, buses and wagons, with train rides included in admission.

The DeQuincy Railroad Museum fills the 1923 Kansas City Southern depot in downtown DeQuincy, Louisiana, with railroad artifacts, brass model engines and an outdoor pavilion of vintage cars. Admission is free.

Built by one Strasburg family since a $12.50 Lionel set in 1945, the Choo Choo Barn is a 1,700-square-foot model train layout of Lancaster County with 17 trains and more than 180 animated figures.

The South Bay Historical Railroad Society runs a free museum in the 1863 Santa Clara Depot, beside Caltrain, with model railroads, artifacts and one of California's last unmodified interlocking towers.

Since 1963, volunteers at the Wanamaker, Kempton & Southern in Kempton, Pennsylvania have run 40-minute train rides on a former Reading branch, with a caboose, a picnic grove stop and family events.

Scottsboro's 1861 Memphis and Charleston Railroad freight depot, one of three pre-Civil War depots left in Alabama, was saved by local volunteers and opens the first Saturday of each month.

In the old South Park rail town of Como, volunteers with the South Park Rail Society are restoring an 1881 stone roundhouse, its depot, hotel and water tower, and bringing steam back with Klondike Kate #4.