The Laws Railroad Museum and Historical Site

The Laws Railroad Museum and Historic Site preserves the railroad settlement of Laws, four miles northeast of Bishop in California's upper Owens Valley. The community began in 1883 as Station, a depot on the Carson and Colorado Railroad, and was renamed in honor of railroad official R.J. Laws; it went on to serve as a station along the 3 ft narrow gauge portion of the Southern Pacific Railroad, a line many Eastern Sierra communities depended on before modern roads were built in the 1950s and 1960s. Today the town survives as a museum of Owens Valley and Eastern Sierra history, registered as California Historical Landmark No. 953, where the station grounds are joined by historic buildings relocated from downtown Bishop — among them a church and a schoolhouse — and docents portray the station agent on most days. The museum's centerpiece train is headed by Southern Pacific No. 9, a narrow gauge Baldwin 4-6-0 built in November 1909 for the Nevada–California–Oregon Railway that worked the SP narrow gauge for the rest of its career and appeared in the 1948 John Wayne film 3 Godfathers. In 2015 the travel site Atlas Obscura counted the museum among 160 "international gems."