For years the Thunder Mountain Line carried families along the Payette River from Horseshoe Bend to Banks on what it called Idaho's only scenic train ride. Here is its story and where things stand now.

In North Creek, New York, an 1872 Adirondack station saved from demolition tells the story of Theodore Roosevelt's midnight ride to the presidency, the Adirondack Railroad and the Gore Mountain snow trains.

The nonprofit Colebrookdale Railroad runs restored century-old passenger cars out of Boyertown along the Secret Valley Line, with cider trains, dining excursions, railbikes and Santa's Polar Bear Express.

Volunteers at the Fox River Trolley Museum in South Elgin run antique electric cars along the Fox River to a forest preserve, over a line first built for an interurban in 1896.

The Oil Creek & Titusville Railroad carries riders 27 miles round trip through Oil Creek State Park, where the American oil boom began, in 1930 Pullman coaches with a working Railway Post Office car.

Oahu's only operating historic railway runs narrated two-hour trips over 6.5 miles of restored Oahu Railway & Land track from Ewa to Kahe Point, with a free toy train museum back at the station.

Inside the 1891 Tampa Bay Hotel at the University of Tampa, the Henry B. Plant Museum shows the original furnishings of a Gilded Age resort built by railroad and steamship magnate Henry B. Plant.

Built in 1905 to unite Alexandria's rail lines, Alexandria Union Station still serves Amtrak and VRE riders and offers interpretive exhibits in its restored waiting room.

An all-volunteer museum in central Illinois that runs one-hour vintage train rides between its Nelson Crossing Depot and the 1899 Wabash Depot in downtown Monticello, with a 1907 steam engine on select weekends.

In Old Towne Belton, Missouri, this volunteer heritage railroad runs a 1950s diesel, a 1920s coach and an open-air car over a surviving piece of the Frisco's High Line to Springfield.

Hamlet's 1900 Queen Anne style depot is still an active Amtrak stop and home to a free museum of the Seaboard Air Line Railroad, with model trains, an engine and caboose, and freight trains rolling by.

In Guthrie, Oklahoma's first capital, the Oklahoma Territorial Museum and Carnegie Library tells the story of the 1889 Land Run and the territory years with artifacts, photographs and paintings.

In Enid, the Railroad Museum of Oklahoma fills a restored Santa Fe freight depot with operating model railroads, a reference library and full-size rolling stock, run by the local NRHS chapter since 1977.

From the Elbe Depot near Mount Rainier, this nonprofit steam railroad runs vintage trains to Mineral through logging country, with Halloween and Christmas trains and a newly restored 1925 locomotive.

The Grapevine Vintage Railroad's Stockyards Trinity River Excursion rolls out of Fort Worth's Historic Stockyards Station in 1920s-era coaches, crossing the Trinity River and Trinity Park on a short family ride.

Dodge City's 1898 Santa Fe Depot once held a Fred Harvey hotel and the El Vaquero dining room. Today the restored building is free to tour on weekdays, with storyboards on the Santa Fe and Fred Harvey.

Bishopville's South Carolina Cotton Museum tells the story of the people who farmed cotton in the state, and it is the local contact for the Merci Train boxcar on display in Memorial Park.

Inside Montana ExpoPark in Great Falls, the Montana Museum of Railroad History gathers artifacts, tools and photographs from the railroads that crossed Montana. Admission is free.

At Carillon Historical Park in Dayton, a replica 1851 locomotive pulls open-air coaches on a nearly mile-long narrow-gauge loop, and volunteer-run miniature trains have carried riders since 1988.

In downtown Bradford, Ohio, a volunteer museum founded in 2002 tells the story of a Pennsylvania Railroad junction town through three floors of exhibits and the restored BF Tower.