Bear Tracks | There’s more than one way to set up a museum.

The Bear heads to three interesting motorcycle museums, the BMW Museum, Deutsches Museum Verkehrszentrum and Voetter’s Oldtimer Museum and gives us a brief review on each.

What’s a museum for, and how is it best laid out? Here are three examples I found on a recent trip to Europe. It’s not a competition, budgets are very different for one thing, but an intriguing look at something we all find interesting, the history of motorcycles.

It always impresses me how different approaches can all be relevant. I have not listed opening hours or charges because they have a habit of changing – check the listed websites.

BMW Museum

Am Olympiapark 2, Munich, Germany www.bmw-welt.com

The company seems to see the museum and BMW Welt as the same thing even though they face each other across a major road. Not only that, but the Welt is free. Ah, if only.

Read Bear’s previous trips and columns here…

I’m not quite sure how many separate incarnations of the BMW Museum I have seen, but there have been at least four. The display space inside the “salad bowl” has been tweaked in various ways to represent a perfect example of a brand-based museum. Today, it shows a variety of ways of tracking a brand’s development. A wonderful two-story wall display traces the development of BMW’s motorcycles, for example.

Other individual and group exhibits trace the development of engineering and even advertising trends, while the story of competition is also told with rare and in some cases unique motorcycles and cars.  The museum makes good use of the company’s Art Car collection with different cars rotated on display.

Unlike many other motor company museums, BMW goes well beyond simple rows of displays and tells its stories. The newer, wave-roofed BMW Welt across the road might be larger, but the museum tells much more coherent stories.

“Unlike many other motor company museums, BMW goes well beyond simple rows of displays and tells its stories”…

Deutsches Museum Verkehrszentrum

Am Bavariapark 5, Munich, Germany www.deutsches-museum.de/verkehrszentrum

The original museum, on Museum Island in the Isar River, is being renovated so it’s good to see that satellite display of the “traffic” museum is unmolested. As the name suggest, the museum shows the use of different vehicles over time, the traffic flow of (mainly) internal combustion vehicles. The great thing about that is that displays are not restricted to any particular brands. If the vehicle was significant on the road in one way or another, it can have a place here.

Not that the Verkehrszentrum allows that to become a restriction, and the daily traffic in its three halls shares the space with race cars and bikes, ICE trains, penny farthings and steam locomotives. My favorite vehicle is a retired three-wheeled Munich street cleaning truck. Does any of that make sense? Go and look at the museum; it actually does. The different displays are arranged mostly in separate islands, each of which tells its individual story. There’s even a motorcycle repair shop from a few decades back, not to mention an MZ police bike from East Germany.

And if you’re looking for something truly unique, you’ll find the world’s first petrol-powered car in these halls which once held transport trade shows. Some exhibits have returned to the very spaces where they were first introduced.

“The different displays are arranged mostly in separate islands, each of which tells its individual story”…

Voetter’s Oldtimer Museum

Schlossstrasse 32, Kaprun, Austria www.oldtimer.museum

If you’re ever playing Scrabble in German and you have a few spare “s”s, Voetter’s street name will come in handy. Or would, if it was admissible.

This private regional museum is near the northern end of the Grossglockner Alpine High Road, but there is something else that’s interesting about it. It is, effectively, in the basement of a hotel which is part of the MoHo hotel association. The Oldtimer Museum holds some 200 exhibits including cars, motorcycles and totally weird things like car number 4 of Vienna’s giant Ferris Wheel.

The museum is a good example of regional specialization. Many of its car and bike displays have some kind of relevance to its location. In the case of Voetter’s, that includes an exhibition of the Volkswagen story, based here because Ferdinand Porsche is buried at Zell am See, just up the road. Many of the other displays represent Austrian engineering and design including what the museum describes as the world’s largest convertible, the Steyr-Zeiserl with 23 seats.

“It has enough examples of sometimes quite rare motorcycles”…

Vehicles are mostly shown where they will fit rather than where they relate to their manufacture or usage, so you get a series of surprises rather than a logically laid out story you can follow. That’s normal in these non-professional venues. Also like most regional displays, Helmuth Voetter’s museum holds a lot of esoteric and only marginally relevant objects like Kaiser Franz Josef’s saloon railway carriage. Despite that, it has enough examples of sometimes quite rare motorcycles (a KTM scooter, for example) to make it highly enjoyable.

And there’s no way I would criticize Voetter’s for its confusion. It’s a wonderful find. And if you stay in the hotel, admission is free.