Nuremberg Transport Museum

Brief Information

The Nuremberg Transport Museum stands in the city where Germany’s first railway began operating in 1835. That is why the railway section here does not feel like a random collection: the museum presents the technology in the very place where the subject itself gained an early point of reference for the country. Founded in 1899, it is considered one of the oldest museums of technical history in Europe, and its current building opened in 1925.

The place is also important because transport here is understood more broadly than rails alone. In 1901, a postal and telegraph department was added to the railway museum, and from this grew a pairing of railways and communications. As a result, locomotives, carriages, postal transport, telegraphy, telephone communication, and technology from teletypes to satellites appear side by side: the museum shows how the movement of people, goods, and messages became one shared system.

What to Notice First

In the railway section, it is worth comparing three scales. First come the real machines: the saloon coaches of Ludwig II and Bismarck, the DRG Class 05 streamlined steam locomotive, the old coal wagon from 1829, and the “Nordgau” locomotive from 1853. The coal wagon especially changes one’s perspective: it is not an impressive passenger train, but a working object, yet it is described as the oldest surviving railway vehicle on mainland Europe.

Then you can move on to the 1:10 scale models. They began to be made back in the late nineteenth century by apprentices of the Bavarian State Railways, so the models here are not simply reduced copies, but an early way of teaching how the technology worked. The third level consists of operating elements: a pedestrian tunnel, a level crossing, signals, switches, and a model railway with a control panel using thousands of relays. This set helps you read the museum not as a storehouse of rare machines, but as a breakdown of the railway into its parts: carriage, track, signal, control, and communication.