The Louisiana Art & Science Museum fills Baton Rouge's 1925 Yazoo & Mississippi Valley depot with art galleries, hands-on science, an Egyptian mummy and a planetarium, right on the bank of the Mississippi River.

For more than 60 years the Boston Street Railway Association has preserved New England transit history through monthly talks, a bimonthly magazine, its own books and the restoration of a Boston Type 5 streetcar.

The Cowan Railroad Museum fills a historic depot that townspeople saved for one dollar and moved across the tracks in 1976, with a rare Porter steam engine and live CSX trains outside.

Venice's 1927 Seaboard Air Line depot, once called the finest station on the line, now anchors a campus with a circus car museum, a caboose and the Rollins W. Coakley Railroad Park.

In West Michigan, volunteers with the Coopersville & Marne Railway run vintage coaches over six miles of 1858 track to Marne and back, with a costumed Pumpkin Train and a much-loved Santa Train.

The Southern Pacific Railroad History Center is building a museum for Rocklin, California, and in the meantime shares Southern Pacific photos, documents and stories from 1853 to 1996 online.

In Griffith Park, volunteers open Walt Disney's own backyard train barn one Sunday a month, with his workbenches, a restored Disneyland Railroad combine car and trains of every scale.

Inside the Henry Ford Museum of American Innovation in Dearborn, the Railroads exhibit puts vintage trains among the Rosa Parks bus, the Wright brothers' plane and millions of other American artifacts.

In historic Downtown Plano, the free Interurban Railway Museum fills the old Texas Electric Railway station with hands-on exhibits and guided tours of Railway Post Office Car 360.

Under McDade Park in Scranton, Pennsylvania, guides take visitors 300 feet down into a restored anthracite coal mine first opened in 1860, with a Hoist House Museum waiting above ground.

From Duluth's historic Depot, the North Shore Scenic Railroad runs narrated excursions along the Lake Superior shoreline and into the north woods, with dome car seats and holiday trains.

In Marceline, Missouri, the Walt Disney Hometown Museum fills a restored Santa Fe depot, and its Marceline Railroad Story gallery tells how the Santa Fe built the town Walt loved.

Etowah's restored L&N Depot was the first permanent building in a town the railroad built from scratch. Today it holds a museum about growing up in a railroad town, right beside the CSX main line.

In a 1909 Louisville and Nashville depot in downtown Foley, the Foley Railroad Museum pairs local railroad history with a big O scale model train layout and a free event train for kids in Heritage Park.

The Terre Haute Children's Museum fills three floors on Wabash Avenue with water play, a tree house and a ropes course. Here is what train-loving families should know, plus hours, prices and nearby rail history.

The Charlie Russell Chew Choo runs a 56-mile round trip from near Lewistown, Montana, over three trestles and through the half-mile Hoosac Tunnel, with prime rib dinners and a holiday North Pole Adventure.

Sandpoint's red brick Gothic Revival depot, built for the Northern Pacific around 1916, is still a working passenger station, the stop for Amtrak's Empire Builder and the only operating Amtrak station in Idaho.

A family guide to Iowa's 10 train museums and rail sites, from Union Pacific's free museum in Council Bluffs to a high bridge ride in Boone, a Milwaukee Road roundhouse in Sioux City and narrow gauge steam in Mount Pleasant.

Georgetown's late 1860s train station, restored by the Historic Georgetown Association, rebuilt after a 2011 fire, and opened for free open houses with model trains and kids' rides on the Lil Toot Express.

Inside Kankakee's restored 1898 Illinois Central depot, the Kankakee Railroad Museum has operating model train layouts, a 1950s Kankakee in miniature, a 1947 Pullman car, a caboose and a trolley.