Awesome Alpine Adventure: Day 8- Swiss Transport Museum.

Day 8- was our last day in Switzerland and so we wanted to see as much as possible.  Since it was such a rainy day we thought the Museums would be the thing to do.  The first museum we saw was the Swiss Transport Museum.
Favorite Picture to capture the post:

Tunnel cutting bit - Outside the Swiss Transport Museum Lucerne Switzerland

I just thought this was really interesting to see.  Its the cutting bit that would be used to make a tunnel in the Swiss mountains.    Then in the wall all those circle things are hub caps from automobiles.  It was very artsy and tastefully done - very modern too and this museum was all about modern machines that transport human beings.

When we went to it we were expecting it to be just one Museum but in reality it was really five museums in one.  They had a building for the Railway system called the Rail Transport, one for automobiles and things that use engines to move them called the Road Transport, one for nautical material called the Navigation, an art museum with the Hans Erni collection and the last building was aerodynamic things called Aviation.  We weren't expecting it to be so big and to have so much to do.  The place was extremely kid friendly with interactive exhibits for them.  The place was definitely designed to be a tour spot with most of the exhibits labeled in more than one language.  My husband liked this a lot since we were able to read about things too in English and have to guess about things.
Here are my images (and let me tell you I took so many more than these and really had a hard time deciding which to include in this post - I almost broke it down into 5 posts since each building could have had a post on its own):
First the RAIL TRANSPORT:
It was a giant warehouse full of trains.  

 One of the first exhibits was this train with the different labels on it explaining how a train works. 

  Here is an example of one of the signs that was there.

 And the Locamotive it was talking about.

 Here's a child's interactive activity where they had to use paper to build tunnels that a marble can roll down.  It looked so simple to do but it was harder than it looked.  You had to get the gradient just so or else the marble would collapse the tunnel. 

 My stepfather love trainsets and he would have loved this exhibit of the different types of trains.  I really liked the way they used models to show so much.

 This was a trolly car.  I hadn't seen one in a long time and thought it was good that they would have one in this museum.

 When I saw this Engine all I could think of was Thomas the Train and all of his friends.  This sure did look like it could be used as a model for one of them. 

 This is what is used to plow through snowdrifts.  I's a pretty impress piece of machinery.

 I liked the bull on the top. 

 One of the things I liked was they would show the undersides and also open things up so you really could get an idea of how the engine and things operated. 

 Here's showing how a cogwheel train would operate.

THE ROAD TRANSPORT.
You had to leave that building to go to the next.  Going into the building you saw all these different road signs.  If it wasn't raining it would have been fun looking at them and figuring out what they meant, instead I just settled for this and looked at it later. 

 You go into the building and you see these computer screens.  There they had all these different images.  You pick one image and then read about it.  But what I didn't realize what would happen was that if you pushed a certain button - it would go and get that vehicle and put it on display provided another one wasn't already being shown.

 Here's the wall of vehicles.  It was like 3 stories high.  You could look at them on your own by going up and down the escalators. Or you could just wait until it was selected.  The yellow device was the machine that would get the bay and pull it out.  I thought it was so igneous how this was designed.  A lot of vehicles in a very small space. 

 Here's on of the pads in a bay. 

 And another one. 

 This was the model being talked about.  It was being moved to a viewing area that was like a theater in the round.  Once it got there it would rotate around as the audio talked about it.  The lighting wasn't good in the theater and I couldn't get a good image of it. 

 Here  was another vehicle that had been selected and was in the process of being moved to the theater. 

 The geologist in me liked this exhibit showing the different sources of energy.
This was Fossil Energy.  It was a piece of limestone with fossils visible in it.

 Wind Energy - Looked like a remnant from a sand dune.

Geo Thermal Energy-  This was a piece of anthracite coal. 

 Bio energy was a piece of wood.  But this looked more like a piece of petrified wood.

 Water energy - A piece of sandstone that had been rounded.

 And the last one Solar Energy -  I wasn't sure if this was a piece of granite or something else that would radiate heat.

I was just glad to see them using rocks like that to explain the different sources of energy and how it all basically comes from the earth.
   We left that building and this was on the other side of it.  

THE WATER TRANSPORT or Navigation.
We walked in and saw kids rowing like crazy.  They were having a race and it was explaining about moving through the water and how you put your paddles in made a difference and it wasn't all about brute strength but more how you worked the paddles.
   Then we saw this where there was a fan blowing wind and you had to move the boat in different directions.  You could move that circular round thing to get  it to move. 

 Here was the sign telling you how to do it.

 It was fun playing around with it.  But then some kids showed up and we let them take over.
because these were ships they had a lot of models.  I could tell that they spent a lot of time on these models and tried to get them as accurate as possible. 

 Another display case of models.

 This was on a front of a sailing vessel and I thought it was very pretty.

 This is a typical boat you would see on the lakes in  Switzerland. 

 I liked this one of an old time sailing ship.

 I thought this was interesting seeing how a paddle boat worked. What I wasn't expecting was all of a sudden the wheel actually started to turn and you could really see how it operated.

 They had this interactive lock and dam system.  It was fun watching how it operated and the kids could control the different channels that would open.

 This was a map showing where the waters in Europe flowed. What you don't see in this image was there was little arrows moving so you could see the direction of the flow and how it was all going towards the big blue areas of the oceans and seas.

 This was a very interesting exhibit showing an old boat that was excavated.  Here's the explanation for the logboat.

 This was the actual boats recovered.  The one was not finished being built and it was interesting to see.

 The one thing I was not expecting to see in this section of the museum was the an exhibit on the cable cars and gondolas and how they were developed. 

 I was really impressed with the size of the cables that get used in the system and reading how they work. It was nice to learn about what weight loads they could carry and such.  They've come a long ways from the days were they had to pull everything by hand and used a system of pulleys.

 We left that museum not knowing what to expect next.  We were surprised to find ourselves in an art museum.

THE HANS ERNI ART MUSEUM
It was nice to have this break from all the machines.  I could tell the art museum was a place where people who where not interested in machines could spend all there time admiring the works that were there while others would go on to other exhibits.

Because the artist is still alive at 104 years I was sure his work was still under copy-write and did not take any pictures in the museum.  This was out side with some of his work around a reflecting pool. 

 Another art piece near the museum but what was fun to see was the actual train that they had running for kids and such to ride in.  The weather kept if from being fully appreciated that day by most people.

 This art piece was on the outside wall and I felt okay to take its image but was a good example of Han's Erni's work. 

 I was really impressed with his work.  I could see a Picasso, Dali and many other artist influencing him yet all of Erni's stuff was very original and had a distinctive style that was all his own.   I really enjoy seeing this place and all the things in it.  They also had a store there and I saw these two scarves and thought of love ones who would really enjoy owning them and got them as souvenir gifts for them. 

 As you can see each piece is so different from each other yet very beautiful and captivating to look at.

The last museum we went into was the:
 AIR TRANSPORT or Aviation

 They had all sorts of things hanging from the ceilings and you had to look up just as much as you did in any other direction.

 It was fun to see them including hang gliding,

 and parachuting.

 This was outside the building but for a lot of kids it was the first time they actually got to see a commercial airplane and what it looks like inside. 

 They also had a big exhibit on air balloons and how they work and I liked this on on the Zeppelins.

 This was a model of the balloon that was able to travel around the world.

 And here you could see the cabin that the two men had to live in while they did it.  I left the man in the picture so you could get a sense of scale to it.  You definitely couldn't have claustrophobia and live in that thing, talk about cramped.  It reminded me a lot of a space capsule.

 I like the looks of this plane and decided to take its pictures.

 They even had a section about outer space and this is a solar panel that is like the ones that was invented to run the space station.

 There was a section on helicopters too.

 And look at this display case with all those different helicopters.  My kids would have loved to have these to play with when they were little.  They were always fascinated by them, just like I was.  It always amazes me that these machines can fly the way they do.

There was more to the complex like a planetarium and also an Imax theater but you had to pay more to go to those and we have already see things like them in other places.  If we had a whole day with nothing better to do we probably would have stayed and enjoyed the shows but we wanted to see other things and passed on them.

This Museum complex comes highly recommended by most tourist books and I can see why.  I would definitely say its worth the time to go and visit it.  I really liked the way the exhibits were so easy to read and made for so many different people to enjoy.

PS:  I do want to thank the group that took us on this awesome adventure and all the wonderful people we got to know while going on it.  You know who you are - THANK YOU.

Once again I must thank my husband for loving to go to places like this museum and making it so enjoyable to see with.  Thank you.

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