The Hellenic Railways Organisation - the national rail company known as OSE - founded the museum in 1978, a way of keeping the machines that built the country's rail network from being scrapped and forgotten. For decades the collection lived at 4 Siokou Street in Athens. In 2019 it moved to the former MPR depot site in Lefka, in the port city of Piraeus. The transition has not been smooth: as of 2022 the museum was closed to the public, its locomotives waiting in storage. It is, for now, a museum in transit - which is perhaps fitting for a collection devoted to things built to move.

The heart of the collection is its steam locomotives, machines that carry their birth years like nameplates. The oldest is a Krauss tank engine of 1884, named Tiryns after the ancient citadel. Belgian-built Couillet engines from 1888 and 1890 sit alongside it, one bearing the name Messolongion. There is an 1899 locomotive from the famous Diakofto to Kalavryta rack railway, still coupled to its third-class passenger coach, and a 1903 engine that was later rebuilt into a snowplough to clear the mountain lines in winter. Each was hand-assembled in an era when a locomotive was the most complex machine most people would ever see, and when a rail line reaching a remote town changed that town forever.

Not every machine here was glamorous. Three small industrial locomotives once hauled ore at the Eretria chrome mines, including engines built by the German firms Jung and Orenstein and Koppel, and a diesel from 1957 - the workhorses of Greek industry, blunt and purposeful. Tram vehicles survive too, among them a 1935 car from the old Piraeus Harbour Tram. In open-air storage, in poorer condition and awaiting restoration, sit a handful of electric cars and trams from the early Athens to Piraeus electric railway, the ancestor of today's metro Line 1. These are the ordinary trains, the ones that carried workers and freight rather than kings - and they tell the more honest half of the story.

Greece is a hard country to connect. Mountains wall off valleys, the sea breaks the land into peninsulas and islands, and for centuries that geography kept communities apart. The locomotives in this collection were the answer to that isolation - the means by which a young nation, independent only since the 1830s, began to stitch itself into a single state. Different gauges, foreign builders, royal gifts and mining mules all reflect a railway assembled piece by piece, line by line, often by outside engineers and outside money. The machines now sit silent in a depot in Piraeus, but each one once meant the same thing to the town at the end of its line: the world had finally arrived.