Swiss Museum of Transportation

The Model Railway Club in which I'm a member usually goes on an annual tour abroad to visit some of the larger model shows in Europe combined with visiting public model railway layouts or real railways of interests. This year's tour started in Switzerland, and as we were not far away from Luzern we went to see The Swiss Museum of Transportation there. It is really large and covers everything within transportation being aviation, maritime, road transport and railways. Some of my fellow members got to see the prototypes for their Garden Trains there (as many of them are collecting Swiss narrow gauge models). I wonder if there is a place to visit if I want to see the prototypes of my (military) Garden Trains?

Railways

First we went to see the railway hall:

It's a really big difference in size between Standard Gauge (left) and Narrow Gauge (right). I actually have a H0e/H09 model from Liliput of the locomotive to the right, but it's very old and won't run properly 

The museum has a lot of 'hands on activities' for kids. This one reminded me of a Inglenook Sidings shunting puzzle

One of the largest model railway layouts in Switzerland is located at this museum. It's a 31,5 meters long and 3,5 meters wide H0 model of the Gotthard Railway. The original layout was old, but it was refurbished, rearranged and reopened as it appears now in 2024. I will add a video of this layout later in this blogpost: 

The helix connecting the layout to the fiddle yard:

The fiddle yard is located behind the layout and in i'ts lower parts. The train rakes stored there are prototypical for Swiss railways:

Aviation

After seing the railway hall we went over to see the aviation and space hall:

Even if they had a lot of real aircrafts there, they also have a lot of models, which caught my eye:

Due to it's nature and topography, Switzerland is made for helicopters:

Some more models. These are radio-controlled. The Swiss Airforce didn't operate many B-17 bombers during WW2, but being a neutral country Switzerland seized different aircrafts landing there due to air combat and bombing raids in Europe:

Luzern is not far away from the Bodensee, which was a takeoff location for Zeppeliners. In the video below there is a glimpse of the passenger compartment of this model:

In the Space department I found this collection of old toys:

Maritime

Here are some very few impressions of the maritime exhibition. Switzerland has operated a lot of different ferries on their lakes and rivers:

Road transport

The hall dedicated to road transport was completely covered by old road signs. This was also covered in a episode of Grand Tour (not the building, but it's content):

Inside there were racks the visitors could operate to bring down a selection of cars and have a closer look at them:

 

Old and new racecars:

Due to it's nature and topography there has also been a lot of cableways and cable cars in Switzerland. Here is a selection of the smaller ones:

I've also made a YouTube video to give a better impression of this magnificent museum:

A visit to this museum is really recommendable, and you'll going to need a whole day to see it all.

After this, my travel group went on to see another pretty new attraction in Switzerland. Please stay tuned...