{"id":1207,"date":"2026-09-21T19:20:35","date_gmt":"2026-09-21T19:20:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/travel.mawds.co.uk\/?p=1207"},"modified":"2026-09-22T08:08:12","modified_gmt":"2026-09-22T08:08:12","slug":"technik-museum-speyer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/travel.mawds.co.uk\/index.php\/2026\/09\/21\/technik-museum-speyer\/","title":{"rendered":"Technik Museum Speyer"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

We’ve spent most of the day at the Technical Museum in Speyer<\/a>. I’d first heard of this in an article in The Register<\/a>, 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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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:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Made in Leeds <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Weird crank powered bike<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Large organ<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Then we headed to the main courtyard. The centrepiece of this is a Boeing 747:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Parts of the interior have been removed so you can see the insides<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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The shipping details from when they got the plane<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Business class<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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First class, upstairs<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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How do you get down? They’ve provided a slide<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

A few more of the outside exhibits<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Some Berlin wall<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Inside an Antonov An-22<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Antonov cockpit – it had a huge crew<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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This was a fun ride.  You went round the track and could get rotated head over heals (or vice versa) by pressing a button<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Orchestra speed control?<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Submarine torpedo tube<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Inside a submarine<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Submarine head.  You could press the button to make the sailor make farting sounds<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

It was really great how you could get inside many of the exhibits and explore.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

After lunch it was onto the space hall. The centre piece of this is the Soviet Buran launcher.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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I’m only slightly surprised they hadn’t mounted it on the 747… If it was good enough for the space shuttle…<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Souyz capsule<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Moon rock<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Kazach kimno – as far as I could tell [astro|cosmo]naughts get these when they land there, for photos afterwards.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

As well as the space stuff, they’d got some other bits and pieces in the space hall<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Lots of (Kawasaki) motorbikes<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Lots of Mercedes<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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The world’s largest robot shop<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Even more stuff outside <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Far from home<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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It appeared to have been converted to a camperbus – there was grafitti on the roof from ’86<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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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:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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By royal appointment<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Mechanical violins<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Player piano<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Fashion:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Lots and lots of scary dolls:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Hunting (and the hunted):<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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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:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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A German Vera Duckworth?<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Roy’s Br\u00f6tchen?<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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After all that fun, we headed into town for a quick look around and to get some food.  The town itself seemed very pleasant.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Bourgois park<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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The cathedral<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Inner tube vending maachine<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Off to Stuttgart tomorrow for the day, where F. heads home, and I head to Munich <\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 READ MORE<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1207","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-europe2026"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/travel.mawds.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1207","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/travel.mawds.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/travel.mawds.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/travel.mawds.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/travel.mawds.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1207"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/travel.mawds.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1207\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1243,"href":"https:\/\/travel.mawds.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1207\/revisions\/1243"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/travel.mawds.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1207"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/travel.mawds.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1207"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/travel.mawds.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1207"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}