A geek’s guide to transport museums that reveal each city’s invisible design and story

It was my first visit to Singapore in 2022 and, much to my host’s bemusement, I had insisted on a visit to a transport museum.

We set out for the Land Transport Authority’s (LTA) headquarters, where we were warmly welcomed and directed to our destination: the SG Mobility Gallery.

This is my kind of tourism.

Tourism authorities around the world are often keen to promote national museums of history, art or culture. I love those too – but the beauty of transport network design, the intricacies of rail maps or the aesthetic pleasure of metro branding? In those we get not just history, art and culture, but also a glimpse of the invisible design that underpins society.

The year 2025 was the 200th anniversary of the world’s first public passenger railway, while 2026 marks 140 years since Singapore’s first passenger rail transport trundled from Tanjong Pagar to Collyer Quay. What better time to ride the rails of the world’s transport museums?

A platform for learning

The SG Mobility Gallery – which closed on Aug 21, 2025, for a revamp – was not your typical transport museum.

This may be because it was not intended to be one. There were no preserved trains, polished steam locomotives or gleaming 1920s tramcars, though the interactive life-size mock-up of a futuristic bus was pretty pleasing.

But for me, an outsider trying to understand Singapore, its interactive virtual reality exhibits were where the real insights lay.

Selecting the perfect spot for new bus stops in a neighbourhood planning game not only showed me how people move around in the heartland, but also gave me a crash course in Singaporean urbanisation.

And the displays on aesthetics and visual design were where I had my first encounter with the Thoughtful Bunch, Singapore’s cartoon mascots for graciousness on transport. 

They may be whimsical – I bought a Bag-Down Benny mug at the gift shop – but they also provide a unique look at Singaporean cultural norms. You do not see much in the National Museum about giving up MRT seats for the elderly or not blasting K-pop on the bus without headphones.

First-class experiences

Learning about new cities and countries through the lens of transport and design is not as niche an approach as it might first sound. 

Rail and transport TikToker Emmanuel Charway says transport museums are a great jumping-off point for tourists getting to grips with a new city.

Based in London, the 20-year-old creates train and public transport videos for some 56,000 followers under the name theblacktrainboy. 

He advises tourists coming to London to visit the transport museum before more famous attractions. “It’s smaller, it’s more accessible, it’s not as intense as the National History Museum or British Museum,” he says in a Zoom call.

The London Transport Museum (

ltmuseum.co.uk

) is, he says, a great way to understand the city’s scale, layout and pace through the history of its famous Tube Map. 

While visits to transport museums in Britain have been on the rise since the Covid-19 pandemic, not all tourists heed his advice.

A few transport-themed museums are in the top 100 most-visited spots, according to Britain’s Association of Leading Visitor Attractions (ALVA) – including the London Transport Museum, with more than 400,000 visitors annually.

But compared with big hitters like the British Museum – steaming ahead with over six million – they are still left waiting on the platform.

A fellow transport enthusiast who agrees with Mr Charway is Singaporean blogger Cordelia Wang. She creates fantasy transport maps and discusses transport design and infrastructure with her online audience under the handle Yuiurbanfantasy.

The 21-year-old always tries to visit a transport museum when travelling. “My personal record is five in one trip,” she tells me. “I’ve seen museums in Japan, China, the US, Britain and Italy.”

As a train lover, she too highlights transport museums’ value for social and historical learning. “While most museums are composed of artefacts that you can mostly see but not touch, transport museums are often unique in that you can get on the ‘artefacts’ and experience the daily life of people in decades past.”

She recalls imagining city life in years gone by as she leant out of a heritage tram in Milan, and “getting on an old Glasgow Subway train with a ceiling so low, you could barely stand up”.

Tickets to the past

The famously tiny carriages of the Glasgow Subway in Scotland are on display at Glasgow’s Riverside Museum (

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).

It is one of Britain’s top 25 attractions, with more than one million visitors in 2024, and the country’s most-visited transport museum, according to ALVA.

Its popularity is not without reason. Housed in a stunning Modernist building by renowned architect Zaha Hadid, visitors can find all kinds of transport: roller skates and skateboards, cars and buses hanging from the ceiling, and a sailing ship docked outside.

But no good transport museum is only about trams and train cars.

The museum explicitly links social history and design to its exhibits on transport, including Scottish engineer Dorothee Pullinger’s 1924 car designed “by women for women”. There are light-hearted explorations of how the city’s long-decommissioned tram network is related to dancing, and displays showing the links between 1960s design icons like the miniskirt and the Mini car. 

But it is not just the lighter side of social history visitors can explore at the museum. The city’s historical links to slavery in North America also come into focus through displays on Glasgow-built ships sold to the Confederacy during the American Civil War, as well as the famously rebellious city’s abolitionist protests against it.

Similarly, visitors admiring the sleek lines of Locomotive 4007 – built in Glasgow in 1947 for South Africa, then a British colony – can read first-hand accounts of the role of the railway during apartheid and Scotland’s part in it.

Though such connections may not always be explicitly signposted, visitors to other transport museums of the world can also explore history and society through rail and transport. 

The Hong Kong Railway Museum (

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) houses a collection of trains and carriages from the past century, as well as an exhibition of signage and infrastructure that will appeal to design fans.

But again, beneath the shiny surfaces of the diesel engines and steam locomotives, there is far more for the visitor to learn about Hong Kong itself.

The museum is housed in the former Tai Po Market station of the Kowloon-Canton Railway. Even the architecture situates visitors in Hong Kong’s history: It is the only station on the British-built section of the jointly constructed line to Guangzhou to be designed in a Cantonese architectural style.

Visitors can trace the last 100 or so years of Hong Kong history through the design and construction of the railway, its trains and buildings, and design elements like signs and maps. 

Constructed when Hong Kong was a British colony, the railway’s early maps and displays prominently featured English text. Trains were mainly British-built, and several were even named after prominent colonial administrators or their wives.

But exploring the collections through the 20th century and up to the modern day, one can get a real sense of the geopolitical and social changes in Hong Kong since the railway’s inception. 

As they clamber onto locomotive footplates and pose for selfies in luxurious first-class and less-luxurious third-class carriages, visitors can see how the language of signage and documents changed over the years, and how British and Chinese design styles found favour at different times.

Even the railway’s route altered depending on the geopolitical situation, with the connection of sections between Hong Kong and China severed at the border at various points through its history.

The next station is unusual

Even for travellers vacationing in places that sell tourism focused on a luxurious, exotic or historical ideal, there is often still an opportunity to see a different view through a transport museum.

One destination enjoying a tourism boom is Uzbekistan, with growing interest from South-east Asia, Europe and the Americas in its ancient Silk Road cities.

While tourist itineraries often focus on the rich history of the ancient trading route, the Central Asian nation’s capital, Tashkent, also has a railway museum offering a glimpse of more modern times.

The Tashkent Museum of Railway Engineering (

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) is another place where the shifting and complex influences of empire and nationhood can be tracked through the collections of locomotives and carriages. 

Visitors can explore the stages of the Russian Empire’s conquest of Uzbekistan, through the 70 years of Soviet rule and into the modern independent era.

Maps of the growth of the regional rail network show tourists the colonial influence on Uzbekistan’s cotton industry, while the influence of Soviet design trends can be charted from the Brutalist heavy locomotives of the Stalin era to the futuristic elegance of later Socialist Modernism.

And Tashkent truly does provide history you can ride: Visitors can clamber into a small diesel engine for a tour of the compound. If you are lucky, the attendants may let you drive it yourself.

Many visitors to Thailand, meanwhile, associate the country with hospitality, the luxury beach resorts of Koh Samui or the backpacker parties of Khao San Road.

But in Bangkok’s Hua Lamphong Station sits the Thai Railway Museum (

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) with a collection of memorabilia, maps, models and several heritage locomotives.

The notion that European empires gifted the railway to Asia is still common in Europe. But in this museum’s collection of maps and plans, visitors can chart never-colonised Thailand’s development of the rail network to serve its own needs, as well as facilitate trade with neighbours.

The museum also offers a closer look at Thai society’s reverence for its royal family through the many intricate and beautiful plaques, flags and railway monuments dedicated to monarchs, princes and princesses, in recognition of their pivotal role in developing the rail network.

All aboard the museum express

Tourists seeking to learn about a place might want to ride the rails for real.

Mr Charway uses public transport to get around when he is visiting new places because it is a great way to see regular city life.

“In Paris,” he recalls, “they’re not very forgiving if you take too long to open the door.” This came as a surprise to the Londoner, who is more used to Brits holding their tongues when tourists inadvertently get in the way.

But he is impressed by Parisians’ sartorial efforts on the Metro. “They know how to dress. They’re pretty posh, very fancy.”

Visitors to all these museums can see the cities through a regular citizen’s eyes by arriving on public transport: from Tashkent’s palatial Soviet-era Metro to Glasgow’s tiny Subway.

But there are also a few museums where visitors can arrive in particular style: by special train to the museum’s very own working station.

The Netherlands’ Railway Museum (

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), designed around an ornate Neoclassical station building, is served by a special hourly train shuttle from Utrecht’s Central Station. Visitors can step off an operational train and directly into the museum collection, charting train and tram design and railway architecture from the 1830s to the present.

Visitors to Budapest are in for a double treat in this regard. Arriving at Deak Ferenc ter metro station, passengers will find the Underground Railway Museum (

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) in a refurbished section of an old tunnel, displaying maps, signs and retired carriages – including the first to traverse the world’s third-oldest underground railway in 1896. 

The Hungarian capital also hosts one of the world’s largest collections of trains and carriages at the Hungarian Railway Museum (

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). 

Visitors here can play-act as a regular Budapest commuter on the local train from Nyugati station which, on weekends and holidays, stops at the museum’s Vasutmuzeum station. Here, guests are met on the platform by museum staff and escorted safely across the rails to the exhibitions.

Train terminates here; all change, please

One of the best things about transport museums is that they are not just visited by rail enthusiasts, but also often staffed by them.

Ask a question in one and you will almost always see the attendants’ eyes light up as they give you the lowdown on the display that piqued your curiosity.

This is often followed by requests for cultural education in return: Where are you from, what are trains like back home, have you tried the local delicacies yet?

My favourite such encounter was at the Tashkent museum, where I was the only visitor in the park on an uncharacteristically stormy weekday afternoon.

When I approached the two older men tending a small engine on a track around the museum, they were none too keen to oblige me with a ride in the rain.

But then I asked about the little train in my heavily accented Russian and the few Uzbek words I had learnt. Within minutes, my two new friends and I were riding the little train through the downpour and I was learning about their pasts driving real, much bigger machines. 

Eventually, I was allowed to drive for a few glorious moments.

After failing to persuade the retired drivers to pose for a selfie, I thanked them and climbed down from the footplate. Shaking my hand, the older man Alisher mischievously told me I should give up on writing. “Writers have soft hands,” he said. “But you have worker’s hands.”

He winked and added: “You should become a train driver instead.”