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54 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 <strong>feature</strong> 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.”
Odin, the fi rst locomotive on the line connecting Copenhagen to Roskilde, in 1847. Railway makes its comeback Today, new lines are being built or planned, such as the one that will connect Copenhagen to Ringsted via Køge; other lines are being electrifi ed, under the combined effect of the convenience offered by ‘fi xed links(*)’ between islands and the Danes’ environmental awareness, effectively relayed by DSB’s communication to its customers. In recent years, these ‘fi xed links’ have not only helped rail to recover market share from the road, but also transformed the way of life for Danes and Swedes on both sides of the Öresund, making Copenhagen and Malmö a single totally integrated urban area with, at its centre, the international airport of Kastrup. On the museum’s mezzanine level we fi nd irresistible 1/20 scale models of the IC3 and the Øresundtåg, the regional train operated jointly by DSB and JS (the Swedish rail operator) across the straight. A museum for all An incredible journey through 170 years of rail history, since the fi rst locomotives imported from England, the Danish Railway Museum’s exceptional collection is the pride of its director: “We feel that we are offering the best collection in Europe north of Berlin! A good third of the 90,000 visitors whom we welcome each year are not Danish. That is why all the signposting is trilingual: Danish, English and German. The museum’s vocation is to be a place of interest for families and not just for railways buffs. It enables children to play with locomotives, and gives them the impression that they are driving them. And then, as we are in Denmark, they can build trains in Lego… We know that it is generally the mothers who make decisions about their children’s leisure time, and that they are looking for places where (*) ‘Fixed links’ designate a series of bridges and tunnels which link between them the main Danish islands (such as the Great Belt with its two bridges of nearly 7 km each and its 8 km bi-tube tunnel) as well as Denmark to Sweden (by the Öresund link, which combines a bridge nearly 8 km long, a 4 km artifi cial island and a 4 km tunnel). � A huge choice of Lego trains... in Legoland (ref. AT Magazine n°3). 55
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