Museum of transportation

Although a separate collection department for the history of transportation was established in the National Technical Museum only in 1960, the museum's professional, collection-building and presentation activities in this field are significantly older, dating back to the first years of the establishment of today's National Technical Museum, then the Technical Museum of the Czech Kingdom. At first, the professional activities were provided on an association basis by voluntary collaborators, who already shortly after the opening of the museum in 1910 in the Schwarzenberg Palace in Hradčany made the first exhibition on the topic of transportation available to the public. At that time, however, this department was called Transport. However, the palace did not allow the exhibition of larger exhibits, for example cars, planes or locomotives.

František Štýdl was a major contributor to the present form of the museum's transport collections. He worked as a curator from the end of the 1930s until 1962, initially on a voluntary basis, and then from 1949 as an employee of the museum. The years of his work are connected not only with the exceptionally high-quality collection-building activities, but also with the construction of a large transport exhibition in the new museum building in Letná. It was opened to the public in 1950 and has been one of the museum's most popular visitor attractions ever since.

After the railway collections were set aside as a separate collection department in 2000, the remaining collection items from the field of transport are taken care of by collection curators, who manage items documenting the development of motorized and non-motorized road transportation, aviation, shipping and firefighting equipment.

In February 2012, the Museum of Transportation became an independent organizational component of the NTM after it was created out of the transformation of the former history of transportation department. The Museum of Transportation is further divided into departments dealing with road, water, and aerial transportation. In addition to its other various activities, it manages the permanent Transport exhibition, which is the largest exhibition of the NTM in scope.