Transport & industrial museums

While France was, until the twentieth century, essentially an agricultural country, it is also a country with a significant industrial history.
     For various reasons, the Industrial Revolution got off to a slow start in France. By the year 1800, France was still a rural society, and the great phase of indusrialisation that had begun in England a hundred years before was hardly visible in France.
     One of the reasons why the French had their "French Revolution" in 1789 was that French society had not evolved. Like other continental countries, France remained attached in the eighteenth century to a traditional mercantile model of society, and did not seek to adopt the new industrial model that was emerging in Britain.
     After the French Revolution, France moved into a period of change; and with that change came industry, more mines, large-scale  production, and from the 1830s onwards railways, the great transport revolution of the nineteenth century.
    The pace of railway building in France was not as frenetic as it was in Britain, where unfettered "railway mania" led to massive overbuild and duplication of routes. In France the building of new railways was done in accordance with a strategic plan, was therefore more coherent and slower. By the late 1880s however, France was effectively criss-crossed by a network of railways, a large part of which are still in service today. The railways transported coal from the mines to the cities, and goods and travellers all over France.
     At the end of the 19th century however, France was among the pioneering nations with regard to automobiles or cars, well ahead of Britain. By 1900, France was the biggest producer of cars in Europe, and remains a major car-manufacturing country to this day. And also in the early twentieth century, France was a pioneering country in the field of aviation, thanks to men like Alberto Dumont and Louis Blériot. After the second world war, France and Britain worked together to produce concorde, the world's first and so far only supersonic jet transport plane; and today France is a world leader in aircraft design and manufacturing, with the headquarters and main assembly plant for Airbus, and the Dassault company still producing state-of-the-art military aircraft.
    Naturally this industrial heritage is remembered in a number of museums across France - car museums, train museums, aircraft museums, space museums, historic mines, and other industrial museums and sites. The best of these are listed below.
Check out locations of many of these museums on Tourist map of France, looking for this marker: