Our recent field trip at school took us to the Uiwang Railroad Museum – home to several decades of trains and train technology both indoors and outdoors. The museum was appropriately located close to the railroad tracks, although we arrived by school van of course.

A mock-up of the high-speed KTX train that spans the country.

Ah-ha – there’s a museum! It’s worth noting that today was ‘school field trip day’ – probably at least a dozen schools all had their kids (all kindergarten or elementary-school age) on the museum grounds.

Now inside the museum, some of the kids pose in front of one of the earlier trains in Korea’s history.

Our fearless principal tries making some of the railroad signals light up, and succeeds in making the kids more curious about the buttons she’s pushing than the lights themselves.

Quite a bit of history to see here, dating back to the turn of the century I believe.

Some of the tools used for aptitude testing of railroad employees. The box (lower left) required one to fit different shapes into a box as fast as possible – sound like Perfection, anyone? The instruments on the top row were coordination-type tests – take a very small-headed hammer and and strike a piece of metal about the size of a nail.

A display of how train tickets have looked in the past. Today’s tickets are about the size of a business card, with enough English and numbers to figure things out. Reading hangeul (the Korean alphabet) makes more of the ticket easier to understand though.

I didn’t see any explanation of this map in English, but I guess it has something to do with taking a looooooonnnnnnnggggggg train ride all the way from, say, London to Seoul.

Our fearless leader led us into a room with a looping video. It didn’t take too long for her to figure out that it was basically an informerical for the great plans and accomplishments of KTX. Needless to say we didn’t stick around too long.

After walking around the 2nd floor for awhile, we came back downstairs and settled the kids into a Railroad Panaroma – complete with the settings of Seoul and lots and lots of trains. The man above ran the model train / light board and gave some running commentary (in Korean, naturally).The show was priceless, no matter what language they were speaking:

By the way, this particular building is the old Seoul Station, with quite a bit of history involved. The new Seoul Station is much larger, and for some reason not pictured in the model.

A gorgeous look at Seoul. The railroad panorama was cute – and a pretty striking scene as the operator made the day turn into night.

Me being my usual abstract-art self.

Our fearless leader getting some pictures of a manual car – chained and locked in place to prevent any actual movement.

Remember that mock-up of the KTX train at the beginning of this post? Well lucky us, we get to go inside…

The inside of the KTX mockup. Having been on the real KTX trains, I’m not surprised to inform you that the real trains look a bit different. While there are video screens in the ceiling, and the seats do face each other in the middle of the car, they’re a different fabric and flooring style now.

Moving on past the KTX mockup, we came across an impressive-looking train of the past.

Finally making it onto a subway of the past – the maps and advertisements hadn’t changed since the cars were decommissioned quite some time ago. It’s difficult to tell exactly how long, though, since I didn’t see any signs as to when these cars were in use.

While definitely NOT a destination for the tourist set, I might consider looking up some more information about it if interested in transportation history. There’s more than enough to see – what you saw in pictures above conveys only what we got to see in a three-hour field trip. While most of the descriptions are only in Korean, there’s an adequate amount of English to find your way around.