We’ve spent most of the day at the Technical Museum in Speyer. I’d first heard of this in an article in The Register, and thought it sounded good. It was a lot bigger than I was expecting; I’d thought it might take a morning, but we were there almost until it closed.
We’d paid a little extra to include an IMAX film. The only one in English was Apollo 11, which started just after we arrived. Just before the film they changed the lighting so you could see the structure behind the screen and all the speakers. You could also see into the projection room before you went in:
Then it was onto the museum proper. The first hall had a large selection of planes, trains and automobiles, as well as some organs and model railways:
Then we headed to the main courtyard. The centrepiece of this is a Boeing 747:
A few more of the outside exhibits
It was really great how you could get inside many of the exhibits and explore.
After lunch it was onto the space hall. The centre piece of this is the Soviet Buran launcher.
I’m only slightly surprised they hadn’t mounted it on the 747… If it was good enough for the space shuttle…
There was a lot more space related stuff; lots of (genuine) half eaten space meals, and other things that’d been into space, and a (very) exhaustive history of space missions. It was well done, but there was an awful ot of it
As well as the space stuff, they’d got some other bits and pieces in the space hall
Even more stuff outside
If all that wasn’t enough, there’s an adjacent museum – Wilhelmsbau – included in the entry price. This was really rather weird. There was a collection of mechanical musical instruments:
Fashion:
Lots and lots of scary dolls:
Hunting (and the hunted):
And perhaps most bizarrely and incongruously of all, some artifacts from Linden Strasse – which as far as I can tell was the German equivalent of Coronation Street:
All of this was only half of the museum. They have another site in Sinsheim, which I think is of comparable size. I’d considered doing both, but they’re surprisingly difficult to get between by public transport. I think doing both back to back would be a bit much, so one for next time I think.
After all that fun, we headed into town for a quick look around and to get some food. The town itself seemed very pleasant.
Off to Stuttgart tomorrow for the day, where F. heads home, and I head to Munich
The museum looks awesome!
It seems strange now that before engine management systems and computerised navigation, intercontinental airliners would have routinely flown with two pilots, an engineer, and a navigator in the cockpit.