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).

Just a few blocks south of the Dom, this former convent houses a vast collection of sacred art and artifacts from religious history. There are magnificent altarpieces, ecclesiastical vestments, beautifully illustrated manuscripts, sculptures, and paintings—including works by Rembrandt and Frans Hals. Note the painting of a silver-bearded God, by Pieter de Grebber (1640), holding what appears to be a crystal ball, inviting Jesus to sit at his right hand in a cherub-bedecked chair. Temporary exhibitions here are first-rate. Cross the first-story walkway to get a great view of the cloister gardens.

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.