LUCERNE, Switzerland — One of these days, I will give a visit to the Swiss Museum of Transport all the time it deserves.
This was not that day.
I’ve now been to the museum — the most popular in Switzerland, with about 530,000 visitors a year — twice. Both times, it has been far too brief — enough to understand why it is so popular, but not nearly enough to fully appreciate all it has to offer.
As it happens, today is the day I shift from solo traveler to member of a tour group. I arrived from Olten shortly after 10 a.m., and wrapped up the solo portion of the tour by hitting a laundromat so I could start fresh for phase two. (I had been hoarding coins the last few days, and needed every one of them: It was 9 francs to wash, 7 francs to dry — and I split the washer load in to two dryers. Total cost: 23 francs, or $25.77 at current exchange rates. No wonder the clientele appeared to be all travelers: For a resident, the motivation to buy a washer is great.)
I then went the hotel where I will join a small group tour on public transportation in Switzerland, sponsored by Swiss Tourism, for the next several day . Fully expecting to have to drop my bag and kill time, I instead found my room was available, so I checked in, picked up an information packet from Lucerne Tourism, went up to my room and reorganized my suitcase with the newly cleaned clothes, and went off to have lunch.
After that, it was time for the optional group tour of the Museum of Transport — but with a quick call to our tour host, I discovered the rest of the group had been delayed in transit from Zurich, so only the two of us who were arriving here separately would be at the museum. There, we were joined with a group of American travel planners — if I understood correctly, they plan large events, and were looking at the Museum as a potential site for banquets or other gatherings.
Anyway, the resulting tour was a fairly cursory overview, and the time we spent in the train, automobile, and aviation halls — the three areas of most interest to me — was slight. Fortunately, during my 2016 visit, during the Swiss Tourism media tour focused on the opening of the Gotthard Base Tunnel, we’d spent a decent amount of time in the train hall, so I was actually able to explain to the cohort from my own tour a few details about the wonderful scale model of the base tunnel (57 meters long, representing the 57 kilometer length, showing all the types of rock it passes through, and how up to 20 trains can be operating in the tunnel at one time). I wrote about that model in my 2017 article on the base tunnel, and it’s still just as impressive.
And once the formal tour was over, I did backtrack to the train hall for a few more photos, but it’s still scorching hot here by local standards (85 degrees, feels like 91 with 51% humidity) and the train hall is not air-conditioned, so I did not have it in me to try the locomotive simulator, or go back into the auto hall and look at the classic Porsches or Formula 1 race cars on display. (And I had missed the chance, offered a few times daily, to compete in performing a pit-stop tire change on one of those Formula 1 cars, which sounds like fun. That’s one of the many, many hands-on activities that the museum emphasizes).
So, next time, I hope to truly give the museum the time it deserves.
Whenver that may be.
