Hong Kong Railway Museum

The building itself is the first exhibit: constructed in 1913 as Tai Po Market railway station, it served the Kowloon-Canton Railway from 1910 until the line was electrified and the station closed in 1983. Its architecture is deliberately unusual for a railway building, using an indigenous Chinese style with a pitched roof, decorative ridges, and carved ornamentation of peonies, red bats and magpies more commonly found on southern Chinese temples than on transport infrastructure. The station was declared a monument, and the museum opened here on 20 December 1986, making it one of the longer-running branch museums in Hong Kong's LCSD network. Outside on the former platforms and tracks sit three preserved locomotives: EMD G12 diesel locomotive No. 51, nicknamed Sir Alexander, built in 1955; EMD G26 diesel locomotive No. 60, Peter Quick, from 1973; and a W.G. Bagnall steam locomotive, No. 17BG, representing an earlier generation of motive power than either diesel unit. Seven historic passenger coaches ranging in date from 1911 to 1976 are also on display, alongside a hand-operated pump trolley and a diesel inspection railcar used by engineers to check the line. Inside the old station building, a smaller exhibition room holds period train tickets, official railway documents and historical photographs charting how the line shaped development along its route from Kowloon to the border. The outdoor layout and hands-on scale of the exhibits, several of which visitors can climb aboard, made it one of the more visited branch museums in the LCSD network in 2025, with around 227,000 visitors passing through. Because admission is free and the site is compact, it works well as a short stop on the way to or from Tai Po's other heritage sites.