The Wirral Tramway opened on 17 April 1995, built and operated under contract by Blackpool Transport on behalf of Wirral Borough Council. The vehicles were Hong Kong tramcars 69 and 70 - real working trams from the Hong Kong system, refurbished and painted in heritage liveries. Number 69 carries the names George Francis Train and Phileas Fogg in honour of two travellers, one historical and one fictional. Number 70 was named Thomas Brassey, after the nineteenth-century Birkenhead-born railway contractor who built lines on five continents. The trams shuttle on a single-track loop with a passing place, the Birkenhead skyline drifting past windows that still bear small Cantonese maintenance stickers. In 2005 Wirral Council took the operation in-house. The museum opened in the tram shed alongside the line, gathering buses, motorcycles, and oddments of Wirral transport history under one large industrial roof.

By the early 2020s the museum was in trouble. It cost Wirral Council 85,000 pounds a year to run and was drawing only about 6,000 visitors. In March 2023, ownership was transferred to Big Heritage, a non-profit also responsible for the Western Approaches Museum in Liverpool and two attractions in Chester. Big Heritage was granted a twenty-five-year lease and announced ambitions to grow visitor numbers to 40,000 a year as part of a wider Woodside regeneration. The museum then closed in April 2023 for major refurbishment. A reopening is hoped for in the summer of 2026. In the meantime, the collection has been thinned: in 2024 the Lisbon tram number 730 - one of the small open Portuguese tramcars - moved to Beamish Museum, and in 2025 the Birkenhead, Wallasey, and Liverpool heritage trams (numbers 20, 78, and 762) were transferred to Crich Tramway Village in Derbyshire. The horse-drawn Liverpool 43 went to Hooton Park Hangars in late 2023.

Beyond the trams, the collection runs deep into the everyday transport of mid-twentieth-century Merseyside. The Birkenhead Corporation buses include a 1943 Guy Arab rebodied in 1953 - wartime utility chassis in postwar dress - and a 1946 Leyland Titan that ran the town routes through reconstruction. The Wallasey Corporation contributes two Leyland Titans, the famous cream-and-sea-green double-deckers that once raced from Seacombe Ferry in fifteen-bus convoys. Crosville Motor Services - the regional operator that connected Wirral to the rest of the North West - is represented by a 1960 Bristol Lodekka, a 1981 Bristol VR, and a 1985 Leyland Olympian. There is a 1949 AEC Regent III from Liverpool, vintage cars including a 1946 Wolseley 14-series police car, a Triumph Dolomite, an Austin 7, and a Morris Minor Traveller. Motorcycles include a BSA Bantam and a 1938 Norton 16H. A 26-foot OO-gauge model railway layout, a reconstructed 1930s garage, and a model of the SS Thurstaston Mersey ferry round out the static displays.