The Slovenská strela is widely known as the revolutionary rail car concept of the Czechoslovak State Railways from the 1930s, which shuttled between Prague and Bratislava. However, the circumstances of its addition to the TATRA collection in Kopřivnice are a story less known. The first idea to include the rail car under the museum collection, came at the end of the 1950s, from a local museum enthusiast and a leading cultural figure of Kopřivnice Emil Hanzelka, who significantly contributed to the establishing of the…

At the Geneva Motor Show in 1949, Tatra presented an innovation with a timeless design – the T 600 convertible that was designed at the Karosa national enterprise in Vysoké Mýto. Before nationalization it was a company owned by Josef Sodomka that produced luxury bodyworks. After its return from Geneva to Czechoslovakia the convertible was gifted to J. V. Stalin on his 70th birthday, as a present from the “Unified Czechoslovak Automobile Industry”. The car arrived in Moscow on 22 December 1949. However, Stalin…

Peek under the bonnet of an original... The takeover of an eight-cylinder Tatra for General Yeremenko. The automobile had been handed over by Josef Veřmiřovský in Cracow in 1945. Black-and white photograph from the archives of the Reeve’s House Museum. 

Multi-seated car NW type B with a canopy belongs among the most important acquisitions from the 1950s and 1960s. It comes from a thirty-piece series produced in 1901-1904, and therefore all acquisitions of this type until 1914 are extremely rare. This collection piece is the oldest original in the Kopřivnice collection, as it symbolically stood at the beginning of a typological line until the delivery of a replica of the first Präsident car completed in 1977. The car had been acquired for the collection in…

The construction of a replica of the Präsident issued from the absence of an original Präsident, the first car made in Kopřivnice, which has been included under the collections of the National Technical Museum in Prague since 1919. The main reason was that Kopřivnice was missing an exhibit that stood at the beginning of a typological line. The decisive impulse to the replica project was a refusal of a loan of the original by the National Technical Museum in 1972, on the occasion of the 75th anniversary of…