Visitors can climb about an extensive collection of train cars and locomotives and can even drive a locomotive them- selves. Train rides in cabooses and vista flats around a enamel balloon track during summer weekends.

Plumas County Museum

500 Jackson Street in Quincy (530) 283-6320. It is one of the most comprehensive, well presented museums in rural California. Cultural and home art displays are complemented by technological displays featuring agriculture, gold mining, logging and railroad history. In accordance with the "living museum" philosophy, most exhibits are rotated periodically.

The museum includes cCollections of Maidu Indian basketry, pioneer weaponry, archeology and natural history, while period rooms depicting early Plumas County domestic life are a main attraction. Outdoors is a blacksmith shop and miner's cabin along with the larger mining and logging implements and a carriage house containing a beautifully restored buggy.

A mezzanine gallery features exhibits of local artisans, and an outstanding archival library is utilized under supervision for research projects. Special events at the museum include the Christmas "Wassail Bowl" and a Summertime Open House, both of which include tours of the 1878 Variel Home adjacent to the museum property. Area literature, histories, artwork and other items are on sale in the museum bookstore.

Historic Variel Home

137 Coburn Street, next to Plumas County Museum, (530) 283-6320. Originally built by Joshua Variel in 1878, this restored three-story Victorian is furnished from the museum collection to represent a middle-class family home in turn-of-the-century Plumas County. Old-fashioned gardens around the home provide a delightful rest stop.

Plumas-Eureka State Park Museum

Located five miles west of Graeagle on Johnsville Road. (530) 836-2380.

This museum is within the Plumas-Eureka State Park preserves the rich heritage of the Feather River Country's gold mining legacy. Housed in a restored miners' boarding house, this museum displays mining tools, photographs, pioneer household items, working models of antique mining machinery and antique skis as well as animals native to the park. The rustic, five-story Mohawk Stamp Mill, which processed raw gold-bearing quartz, is among the buildings nearby, which also include a blacksmith shop, a bunkhouse and a miner's home. Supervised gold panning programs are offered in the summertime along Jamison Creek.

There are also the Indian Valley Museum, Chester-Lake Almanor Museum. Collins Pine Museum, Jim Beckwourth Museum, Frank C. Reilly Museum and Williams House Museum.