Swiss Museum of Transport

A portion of the outdoor area of the museum showing the Swissair Convair 990 Coronado jet airliner

The Swiss Transport Museum or Verkehrshaus der Schweiz, in Lucerne, is a museum, opened in July 1959 and exhibiting all forms of transport (including locomotives, automobiles, ships, and aircraft) as well as communications. It is Switzerland's most popular museum. The museum also maintains a large collection of work by Hans Erni, a local painter and sculptor.

There are several other attractions in the museum besides the collection:

• Planetarium
• IMAX
• Swiss Arena, a 1:20,000 scale aerial photograph of Switzerland

It also houses EURECA, a 4.5 tonne satellite among the few space objects put into space and returned safely;EURECA and its return to Earth was a cooperative effort between several Western European countries and the United States in the 1990s.

A Spacelab Pallet was handed over to the Museum for permanent display on 5 March 2010. The Pallet, nicknamed Elvis, was used during the 8-day STS-46 mission, 31 July - 8 August 1992, when ESA astronaut Claude Nicollier was on board Shuttle Atlantis to deploy ESA's European Retrievable Carrier (Eureca) scientific mission and the joint NASA/Italian Space Agency Tethered Satellite System (TSS-1). The Pallet carried TSS-1 in the Shuttle's cargo bay.

Access

The museum is located on the shore of Lake Lucerne in the northern section of the city of Lucerne, some 30 minutes on foot from the city centre. It is served by trains of the Lucerne S-Bahn at the adjacent Lucerne Verkehrshaus railway station, by boat services of the Schifffahrtsgesellschaft des Vierwaldstättersees on the lake, and by the Lucerne trolleybus system. All three provide convenient connections with central Lucerne.

See also

• List of aerospace museums

Gallery

• Vekehrshaus1.jpg
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External links

• Official museum website
• Official website of painter Hans Erni
• Official Website of Lucerne