Randall Museum: A Toddler-Sized Surprise Above the Castro

We didn’t know the Randall Museum existed until we were basically standing in front of it. It sits on the hillside below Corona Heights Park, free admission, and we walked in with my son mostly to see what was inside.

The building itself is small, but the basement is where it gets good. Down there is a massive HO-scale model railroad — full towns, mountains, a rail yard, tiny cars queued at crossings, a control panel with more switches and dials than I could make sense of. It’s one of the oldest continuously operating model railroad layouts in the western US, and volunteers from the Golden Gate Model Railroad Club run it on Saturdays. My son was locked in immediately.

He found a caboose rolling through one of the little towns and wouldn’t stop pointing at it. I hadn’t thought about what a caboose even was in years, and here he was, transfixed by a two-inch-long replica of one clattering past a model gas station.

We never figured out what the museum’s overall theme is supposed to be — it covers ocean ecology, geology, and railroads, plus a live animal exhibit called Wild in California with native species like snakes, turtles, and birds. That last part was the other hit of the visit. My son got attached to one of the turtles and didn’t want to leave the enclosure.

For a museum we stumbled into without a plan, it earned a real reaction out of a toddler on both ends — model trains in the basement, a live turtle upstairs. Pair it with the short climb up to the park summit if you still have legs left; the museum and the viewpoint share the same hillside. Worth building a morning around if you’ve got a kid who fixates on either trains or turtles.