MOROCCO IS ACCELERATING! feature - Alstom

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culture
Poul Thestrup, Director of
the Danish Railway Museum.
Snowplough.
Why was the Danish Railway Museum
built in Odense and not in Copenhagen?
Not because the capital of Fionie is also
the country of Hans Christian Andersen,
but because it has a huge depot, built
in the 1950s and equipped with a swing
bridge. “In those days,” recalls Poul Thestrup,
the museum’s director, “the idea of building
a bridge over the Great Belt was already
being discussed and the rail company
was looking for a maintenance site for
its steam locomotives, on the other side
of the channel. But by the time the Odense
depot was built, the idea of a bridge
had been buried and steam had given
way to diesel-electric… The depot was
therefore more or less empty.”
Indeed, from 1900 onwards, private collectors
had begun to collect what could constitute
the basis of a railway museum, but it was
not until 1934 that a small museum actually
opened on… the fi fth fl oor of the railway
building in Copenhagen! It goes without
saying that the items exhibited were limited
to models, posters and uniforms,
the locomotives and cars being dispersed
between different depots, including the one
at Odense. 1975 saw the birth of a museum
worthy of this term in Andersen’s
birthplace and, over the years, the collections
gradually fi lled the depot’s 5,000 m 2
to eventually occupy the entire space.
Another identifying feature of the Danish
Railway Museum is the scope of its activity,
highly unusual for a museum. A subsidiary
of the DSB, the public railway company,
the museum offers a broad palette of services
that range from making old trains available
for hire – usually reserved for corporate
entertainment or events involving the royal
family – to clearing snow on tracks with huge
snowploughs. One of these, made of metal
plated wood painted grey and red, stands
in the museum’s main hall. Lastly, but
no doubt most signifi cant of all, the museum
is distinguished by its noble ‘Protektor’:
His Royal Highness Prince Frederik.
Rail, the rise and fall
The history of Danish rail goes back
to 1847, the date of the opening of the fi rst
line connecting Copenhagen to Roskilde,
a distance of 30 km. An English engineer
called William Radford supervised the works
and the locomotives were imported
from Sharp Brothers & Co., in Manchester.
In 1844, the fi rst line was built under
the Danish monarchy, between Altona,
near Hamburg, and Kiel, on the Baltic Sea.
King Christian VIII inaugurated the line
from his position as Duke of Holstein,
although the region was in fact part
of the German Confederation.
The construction of new lines spread
throughout the kingdom and reached
5,300 km in 1929. This extremely dense
network connected even small
country towns to each other.
“The arrival of the car,
in the 1930s,
marks the beginning
of the decline of rail
in Denmark,”
explains Poul Thestrup.
“Each year, more and more secondary
lines closed, returning the size of
the Danish network to what it had been
at the turn of the previous century.”