3 Best Sights in The Randstad, Netherlands

Beyond the converted 19th-century station that serves as the entrance to this excellent museum is a vast exhibition space in the style of a rail yard. In addition to dozens of locomotives, several theme zones take you on a tour of rail history. In the Great Discovery, dealing with the birth of the railways, you follow an audio tour (available in English) through an early-19th-century English coal mine. Dream Journey stages a theater production based on the Orient Express. In Steel Monsters, you sit in carriages and ride the rails, while all around you the bright lights, sounds, and billowing steam evoke the Golden Age of train travel. Outside, kids can ride the Jumbo Express on an adventure trip past lakes and through tunnels and water jets. The museum is an easy walk from the city center; alternatively, trains run between here and Utrecht Centraal Station eight times daily (€2.60 one-way).

This supercharming and tuneful museum is housed in an old church, and has a large collection of automated musical instruments from the 15th to the 19th century. You can wander around by yourself, but it's far more rewarding to wait for a tour (also in English), so you can see these dazzling automata in action. The highlight for everyone, young and old, is a tiny music box in the form of an ancient furry rabbit, which pops up out of a fading cabbage and beats time to the music with its ears. Fittingly for Holland, the development of the barrel organ—still the bane of shoppers on many busy streets—is charted from the Renaissance onward. Away from the main collection, the children's Music Factory has displays of historical instruments hardy enough for three-year-olds to try—they can go at it on percussion instruments, bicycle bells, and harps.

The University Museum deals with both the history of Utrecht University and the fields of science. The first thing you'll notice is the building itself: architects make special trips to study Koen van Velsen's square building and his garden "boxes"; a glassed-in corridor runs the length of the building, giving an immense feeling of space. One collection, bought by William I and donated to the museum, verges on the ghoulish: skulls, anatomical models, and preserved "things" in jars—medical ethics would prevent these exhibits from being preserved now, most notably the embryos, which only increases their fascination for youngsters. In the third-floor Youth Lab, kids can have a field day: they put on mini lab coats to do experiments and play with optical illusions. A former orangery is now a garden-fronted café.