Railway Museums Worldwide

Within my chosen geographical area which excludes North America, most of Europe and Japan, the occurrence of genuine railway museums as opposed to the odd preserved steam locomotive or tourist railway is quite rare. Here you will find a list of known links which describe those I either know about through personal experience or through submissions to my website or which have been located by web searches. Some are no more than (steam) locomotive parks, others have barely a steam locomotive to be seen. It will be a useful quick check list for readers making short visits. I have also included a note of known steam tourist operations where appropriate for Africa, Asia and parts of South America, the latter are covered in more detail in the relevant continent page. By and large the links are to pages which are in English, although these days a web-based automatic translation will normally produce something good enough to get started during a visit.... Please email me with additions and corrections to the address at the end, include a sensible and appropriate subject line to help avoid vanishing into the spam filter.

There are certain umbrella organisations whose sites may be helpful, particularly IATM (International Association of Transport and communications Museums) - see http://www.iatm.org/finished/start_klein.php - railways are necessarily a small sub group. Others are regional and are noted as appropriate.

Another recommended link - http://www.innvista.com/culture/travel/rail/mindex.htm - as of September 2007 it was last updated in February 2007 and less complete than this site for non-mainstream areas, but necessarily it may be updated, but it will be a good source for the USA, Canada, Australasia and Western Europe.

As always Wikipedia is worth a look but when I checked this page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railway_museum it had far fewer entries in my areas than are on this page.

This page covers railway museums in Australasia, either scroll down the page or click on a continent for a further menu.

Africa
(3rd Dec 08)

Americas
(28th Nov 08)

Asia
(9th Feb 09)

Australasia

Europe
(21st Jun 09)

Australasia

There are many links available on this site, I am not going to repeat them here as it would be twice the maintenance work to do so....

Australia

See http://www.internationalsteam.co.uk/anz/ausop.htm and Association of Tourist and Heritage Rail Australia (ATHRA) - www.athra.asn.au.

New Zealand

See http://www.internationalsteam.co.uk/anz/nzop.htm, National Federation of Rail Societies and http://www.nzmuseums.co.nz.