Walt Disney's Carolwood Barn

Walt Disney's Carolwood Barn is a museum located at the Los Angeles Live Steamers (LALS) complex in Griffith Park. It is a miniature barn once used by Walt Disney as a machine shop while operating his miniature "live steam" Carolwood Pacific Railroad layout in the backyard of his home in Holmby Hills, a district of Los Angeles, California.

The barn is currently open the third Sunday of every month from 11am to 3pm. Admission is free, but donations are welcome. The barn is owned by the Walt Disney Family Foundation, and operated by the Carolwood Pacific Historical Society and the Carolwood Foundation.

Walt Disney vividly remembered having a barn on his family's farm in Marceline, Missouri, where he would play as a child. One of his very first attempts at entertainment was putting on a barnyard circus for his friends in the barn. However, the farm animals did not want to participate in his show and his mother made him give back all the money he had "earned". The barn was always a source of magic and wonder to Disney.

Walt Disney and Ward Kimball, one of his animators, attended the Chicago Railroad Fair in 1948. The journey rekindled Disney's fascination with steam locomotives and he returned to California with ideas for a live-steam garden railroad layout. The Disneys purchased a five-acre site in Holmby Hills (just north of Beverly Hills) with landscaping room in mind for wife Lillian's flower gardens, and the trestles and tunnels which Walt fancied. To retain the reporting marks of the live-steam miniature locomotive reproduction of Central Pacific Railroad #173 he named his railway the Carolwood Pacific Railroad, a convenient reference to their address - 355 North Carolwood Drive.

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