A few days back I visited Maritmuseum in Gothenburg, Sweden. It was great to finally find a museum which was actually open! This museum is within walking distance of the downtown area. They have a large collection of (mainly commercial) vessels, not all of which are kept on-site, but there were five warships on display when I went - all afloat.Firstly the destroyer Smaland. This was a post-war class roughly contemporary and comparable with the Darings - which made an interesting comparison for me because I am quite familiar with Vampire which is preserved in Sydney. There was an extensive tour route onboard which accessed pretty much the entire ship - it was at least as extensive a route as I can recall on any destroyer-sized museum ship I have visited. They obviously don't work under the same WHS rules as we do, because we could never get away with some of those long vertical ladders without fall protection in a museum ship in Australia! One of the surprises for me was that they had a hangar for their surface-to-surface missiles deep in the ship, with a hoist that took them up to the launcher (which was effectively just bolted on top of one of the torpedo tube mountings). I know some of the Russian ships carried reloads for their SSMs, but I wasn't aware of western ships that did this. A lot of customer-facing surfaces of the ship appeared to have been painted relatively recently, but you didn't have to look hard to see that they are finding keeping up with corrosion to be a challenge on a ship of this size - and some of the exposed areas of canvas (e.g. the turret bellows) were pretty deteriorated.The second ship visited was the Draken class submarine Nordkaparen (1962). This boat was wedged between the others in such a way that it was almost impossible to get a decent photograph of it. The tour route took you onto the casing, but there was no below-deck access. She was also looking a bit shabby and could do with a decent paint-job.The third ship visited was the missile boat Hugin (1978). You could get onboard her (upper decks only). She was also a bit shabby.The fourth ship was the small WW2 minesweeper M20. This ship is owned by the museum but operated by an independent trust. By the look of things, it appears that they still take her to sea - but the gangways were roped off, so there was no access onboard.I almost missed recognising the fifth ship, because it is doing a pretty good job of disguising itself as a pontoon! The 1875 coastal monitor Solve is berthed between Hugin and M20. This ship was 'discovered' in a scrap-yard in 1984, and rescued by the museum. The turret is long gone, but she is original from keel to deck, and in reasonable condition. You can go through the internals of the ship - but at the moment she is really just a shell while they work on a plan to restore her.The museum does have a sixth warship which wasn't onsite - the minelayer Kalmarsund (1953) which is currently rented out to one of the local universities, and isn't open for visitors.One of the commercial ships in their collection has been converted into a cafe and shop, which had quite a good collection of books for sale. All in Swedish, but I did pick up a good book on the post-war Swedish Navy for a pretty reasonable (for Scandinavia) price.
Gothenburg is one of the nicest cities we have visited on this trip, so it, and the Maritmuseum, are well worth going to.
Links:
Explore our floating museum in the heart of Gothenburg | Maritiman