Laws Railroad Museum

Laws was the name of a stop on the old narrow-gauge railroad, and though the railroad is gone, the stop is now an 11 acre museum of railroad life. The rail line that once connected the Owens Valley to the world, the Carson and Colorado, was built in the 1880s, primarily to service the mines of the valley. It ran from Keeler to Carson City, Nevada where passengers and freight would transfer to trains bound for San Francisco. The Owens Valley line was abandoned by the 1960s, and the steel rails removed for scarp. The hamlet of Laws, named after Robert J. Laws, the engineer who supervised the line’s construction, was an interface between the railroad and the town of Bishop. After service to Carson City was discontinued, the railroad continued to serve Keeler with the “Slim Princess,” operated by the Southern Pacific Company until 1959. By this point, most of the buildings in Laws had fallen apart or had been torn down. Only the depot, agent’s house, turntable, and the oiland water tanks survived. Many of the historic looking buildings moved to the museum at Laws are old movie sets. Like much of the Valley, the museum is on land leased from the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power.