Road

Our Road Transport collection covers buses, trams cars, motorcycles, scooters, bicycles, traction engines, horsedrawn vehicles, hand carts and even a pair of sedan chairs.

The collection includes vehicles used in Ireland as part of everyday life in the past two centuries. It includes passenger and goods vehicles as well as fire engines, ambulances and racing cars.

We also hold an extensive collection of vehicle workshop manuals in our archives.

The museum illustrates the ways of life, past and present, and the traditions of the people of Northern Ireland. We have been adding specimens for almost a century to become the most extensive and varied transport collection in Ireland. Only at Cultra can you see the full variety of vehicle types once in common usage locally. We have examples of Ulster-built coaches, cars and bicycles including Crossle, McCandless and Harkness.

Highlights include a sedan chair from 1785 and a prototype DeLorean car. We have two trams from the world’s first hydro-electric tramway that connected Portrush and the Giant’s Causeway.

A horsedrawn ice cream van dating from the 1890s and battery-electric powered Co-op milk float demonstrate that commercial vehicles are certainly not a new invention.

A fine collection of fire engines covers 150 years of fire-fighting.