Director of NTM: The railway museum will be created at Masaryk Station

Prague - One of the priorities of the new director of the National Technical Museum (NTM), Horymír Kubíček, is the opening of a new Railway Museum. The long-prepared museum, the establishment of which was mandated by the government to NTM back in 2000, is set to be created in the area of the former railway depot at Prague's Masaryk Station. Kubíček informed journalists about this today. According to the Ministry of Culture, the costs for the museum's creation are estimated at 300 million crowns, with 170 million allocated from the ministry's investment funds for next year.
Plans for the establishment of the museum at Masaryk Station have been in place for several years; however, this location was later questioned, and the former management of NTM planned to locate the museum outside of Prague.
The area around Masaryk Station is located in the center of Prague and is a very lucrative spot from the perspective of developers. The former NTM director, Tomáš Kupec, proposed to the site manager, the director of Czech Railways, to exchange the Prague depot for the former Děčín-východ station and establish the museum there.
However, the relevant government resolution specifies the exact location for the museum, namely the former depot at Masaryk Station. Today, plans are once again focused on Masaryk Station.
According to architectural historians, a railway museum at this site would be significant for several reasons. The locomotive depot, which has been present since 1845, is the most authentic preserved industrial Classicist architecture in the territory of Prague, and experts claim that the collections of the Railway Museum are among the highest quality in the world.
Kubíček stated today that the exhibitions of the Railway Museum will be developed in collaboration with the National Museum and the Military Historical Institute. The new specialized museum on trains will not display the entire railway rolling stock managed by the NTM. Currently, this collection comprises about 120 pieces and is continuously expanding. However, no collection institution in the world presents all its exhibits at once.
According to Kubíček, people also need not worry that the popular toy trains and wagons from the transport hall in the main building of the NTM will disappear - their presence there is planned even after the museum reopens next year following a major renovation.
Kubíček believes that the position of the National Technical Museum does not correspond to the rich and long tradition of Czech technology given its extensive collections. He sees his mission as creating from NTM "the flagship of our technical museums" comparable to the status of the National Gallery in Prague and the National Museum.