Sweetheart Special Vintage-Rail Trip

Support Museum With AmazonSmile

If you are an Amazon shopper, here's an easy way to support the museum: Sign up for Amazon Smile!

Here's all you need to do:

1. Go to https://smile.amazon.com/ on your computer, tablet or phone.

2. Register for Amazon Smile. If you already have an Amazon account, you will be able to use your existing account information)

3. Select “Institute for American Research” when you are asked to designate which non-profit you wish to support. The Institute for American Research is the parent non-profit organization for the South Coast Railroad Museum. If you have questions, you can learn more about the Institute on the museum's website at: http://goletadepot.org/museum_organization.php

4. Be sure to make all future Amazon purchases at https://smile.amazon.com/ rather than at the original Amazon website. You will find that AmazonSmile is the same Amazon that you already know. Same products, same prices, same service. Even your same shopping cart will be waiting for you!

It's that simple. Once you are signed up, Amazon will donate to the South Coast Railroad Museum 0.5% of all of your purchases made through AmazonSmile!

Thank you for your support!

Garcias Are Museum Heroes

A small museum like ours needs lots of friends. When they are called upon to help, those friends become nothing short of heroes. Andrew, Angelica and Alexander Garcia have been museum friends and heroes for a long time, going back to their days as students at Dos Pueblos High School.

The brothers and sister have been helping with museum events — notably Easter Bunny Express and Depot Day — for several years, assisting with pre-event setup activities as well as staffing during the actual events.

Today, all three Garcias are students at U.C., Santa Barbara. Andrew and Angelica are sophomores, Alexander is a freshman. They are all majoring in history.

The museum is very fortunate to have such caring and devoted friends and heroes as Andrew, Angelica and Alexander Garcia!

Trains For A Green Planet

A new page has been added to the museum website. Entitled Trains For A Green Planet, it represents our modest attempt to help inform the public about the environmental benefits of travel and transport by railroad. You can visit the new page here.

That fact is that regardless of whether it's for passenger travel or the hauling of goods and commodities, trains have proven themselves to be a highly efficient transportation medium. The result can be significant fuel savings and lower greenhouse-gas emissions.

At the museum, itself, we are helping to save energy and reduce carbon-dioxide emissions by moving toward a fixed schedule of departures for our miniature-train ride. This system is gradually replacing the on-demand ride scheme that we have used for many years. The new system means lower engine hours, less fuel consumption, and more passengers and fewer empty seats per train trip.

How Can You Help? Regardless of how you choose to travel, the additional fuel cost for you to fill an empty seat is extremely low. This means that you can reduce your carbon footprint not only by taking the train, but also by carpooling or riding the bus, light-rail, or other forms of public transportation.

Museum Joins Rose Parade Festivities

The South Coast Railroad Museum played a small part in the 2014 Rose Parade. Aboard the Rotary float, which depicted a steam train in motion, were Rotary International President Ron Burton and his wife, Jetta Burton. The Burton’s costume for the event included engineer’s caps supplied by the museum – perfect attire for their place of prominence in the cab of the locomotive.

The television audience for the Rose Parade is approximately 47 million viewers in the United States and another 28 million worldwide. An estimated 700,000 parade-goers lined the streets of Pasadena on Jan. 1.

Our thanks to Walt Stephens, mover-and-shaker with the Rotary Club of Goleta Noontime, for his role in making the museum's participation possible.