Swiss Transport Museum
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• This museum in Lucerne deserves a separate section of its own. It is a huge place with exhibits on virtually every kind of transportation relevant to Switzerland. Interactive, hands-on stations are the norm and a large outdoor “work zone” is set aside for kids. There, they can operate pint-sized construction equipment, such as cranes and fill trucks --- even moving them around and dumping out the load. Personal transportation devices as mundane as scooters, skateboards and bikes are also available for tryout.
  
  What could be a long day of discovery begins by walking through these doors:
  

  

  
  In the Road Transport Hall, a floor-to-ceiling “car well” contains 80 unusual vehicles --- cars, bikes, motorcycles and horseless carriages:
  

  

  An automated gantry can retrieve any one of them upon request. Without assistance, the gantry deposits the selection on a stage platform and, later, retrieves and stores it. Like something out of a cartoon, this coupe was center stage in the car theater when we arrived:
  

  

  In the background can be seen part of the audience. They are listening to the car’s history while it rotates before them. Voting by push button, the audience determines which vehicle will be displayed next. When we left the area, a racing machine was in the spotlight:
  

  

  
  This museum was full of surprises. Of special delight to some Merry-Go-Round fanciers was this one, possibly the world’s smallest:
  

  

  
  A steam-driven snow plow caught our attention when we read it was developed originally in North America for use in the Rocky Mountains. Capable of throwing snow 90 meters sideways and 18 meters in height, it was purchased for the Gotthard Railway in 1895:
  

  

  
  What would a transport museum be without an aviation hall? This one focuses on planes flown in Switzerland:

  

  Large as that hall is, not all such planes would fit. One glaring example is this Convair 990, perched in the air over the museum’s interior courtyard as if about to land:
  

  

  The installation of this aircraft at the museum is a fascinating story that involved, in part, transport of the plane on Lake Lucerne.
  
  It would take a week to fully cover all that is available at this museum. We had more limited expectations --- and available time. Nevertheless, during our short visit, we squeezed in two enjoyable live performances: a Planetarium presentation and the Gotthard Tunnel Show.