Slovenian Railway Heritage
The Railway Museum started to emerge in the 1960s and has gradually developed into a small but well laid-out and comprehensive museum in a former locomotive shed at Parmova 35. The main building is the roundshed with a turntable in front of it. A permanent exhibition of other key sciences needed for a railway to operate is located in the nearby ancillary building of the rotunda.
The museum is focused on the Slovene railway history, both material and non-material. There are 60 historic locomotives in its collection and more than 50 other vehicles. Furthermore, there are some 5000 historic railway artefacts in its depots.
Not only the collection of the museum pieces is of importance but the site the Museum occupies as well: it is the ambient where the steam locomotives had been kept and repaired, the habitat of these iron horses.
It is the ambition of the museum to make the visitors, especially children, acquainted not only with historic vehicles but with the railway as a whole, so there is a permanent display of following departments: locomotives and other vehicles (in the roundshed), station master’s office, development of the network; constructing and maintaining the permanent way, communications, uniforms, signalling and safety equipment and small art gallery.
The beginnings and growth of the museum
The notion of documenting the history of Slovene railways was born in the 1960s when it was becoming clear that the era of the steam locomotive was drawing to a close. If this was late in the day, it was because a decision had been made after WW2 to make Belgrade the base for railway museum activities for the whole of Yugoslavia, a choice that led later to the establishment of the Belgrade Railway Museum.
When the railwaymen and women of Slovenia elected to establish a museum of their own, they chose for its location the former locomotive shed at Ljubljana Šiška.
