Visited Omega Museum today. Wow!!!

gbesq

Did they have an “It was a spectacular failure in 1958, but every collector wants one now” Ranchero exhibit? 😉 Yes, I know, a shameless plug for the fourth Musketeer …

gbesq

Did they have an “It was a spectacular failure in 1958, but every collector wants one now” Ranchero exhibit? 😉 Yes, I know, a shameless plug for the fourth Musketeer …

BrunoCodispoti

Thanks for sharing your experience 😀

SOG53

Do you know any background why Omega chose to name this Ranchero? I read that the name was unpopular in Spanish speaking countries and that had something to do with its commercial failure. Also it looks so similar to the Seamaster and Railmaster.

Redondo444

If you are in that area you might also consider to go to La Chaux-de-Fonds. It is a 40 Minute train ride from Biel and worth a visit if you want to breath the history of swiss watch making. The town is also very much unique due to the city planning 100% supporting the swiss watch making industry.

https://switzerlanding.com/la-chaux-de-fonds/

/Quote
Is La Chaux-de-Fonds Worth Visiting?
The town is absolutely worth visiting if you’re familiar with its attractions and you know what to expect from it. If you’re expecting a big city experience with numerous museums and landmarks, maybe you’re better off traveling to Zurich, Bern, or Geneva.

But if you want to discover its importance in the watch-making history of Switzerland, and tour the many houses and buildings designed by famous architects, it’s definitely worth it to spend a few days in this city. This is especially true if you’re already traveling in the Neuchatel canton, and you’re lacking ideas on interesting places to visit in the region.
/Unquote

Jonathan40

Thank you for replying. Will look at the area.

WurstEver

I was lucky enough to visit the museum a couple of weeks ago, so I thought I'd jot down some notes that might be useful for future visitors. There are no major revelations here, but hopefully a handy nugget or two.

Getting to Biel
Getting to Biel by train from the Zurich airport is relatively straightforward. Once you collect your luggage, it is a short walk across the road to the airport train station. There are three options for buying train tickets. You can visit the SBB office and talk to a consultant (English should not be a problem), you can use the ticket machines located in the station, or you can download the SBB app and purchase tickets online. Since it was our first stop in Switzerland, we chose the safe option for our trip to Biel and spoke to a consultant (we had to wait about 15 minutes). For all of our subsequent trips we used the app. Poorly designed apps are a real bugbear of mine, but the SBB app is well designed and we found it to be a super convenient way to manage our tickets for the remainder of our travels around Switzerland. The trip to Biel by train takes around 1.5hrs.

Getting to the museum
Once you arrive at the main train station in Biel, it's a fairly flat, more-or-less straight walk north-east of about 30 minutes to the museum. Most of the way you'll be walking along a nice little canal. The city is an interesting mix of the old and the new. There's a lovely little old town area and some nice gardens if you have the time to take a detour. We chose to stay in town for a couple of nights so that we could use Biel as a launching place for our tour of the JLC factory in the Vallee de Joux (also well worth doing). We stayed at the Mercure Plaza in Biel, which is about half-way between the station and the museum, and found it to be a pretty good option.

At the museum
Looking from the street, you have the building marked "Montres Omega" with the lunar lander on the left-hand side of the forecourt. On the ground floor of that building is a small boutique. To the left of the lander is a more modern glass building - this is where the museum is located. Something that I'd not understood was that the Omega Museum is co-located with the Swatch museum; the former being on the first floor, the latter on the second. I thought the Swatch museum was worth a look, but it may not be to everyone's tastes. Entry to both is free and we had the place almost to ourselves (just a handful of other visitors) at 1130 on a Tuesday. It took us about 2.5hrs to go through both. There is also a small Swatch store located just outside the main buildings. We walked away with a couple of Moonswatches as souvenirs of our visit.

Miscellaneous
A couple of random things that we might have found useful to know. First, we struggled to find somewhere to have lunch around the museum. While there are some cafes/restaurants nearby nothing was open when we were there. Not sure why. Second, I hadn't realised prior to our visit that Switzerland uses a different power outlet from most of the rest of continental Europe. The hotel room had one regular European type outlet (with the round profile), but the rest were of the Swiss type (with the flattened hexagonal profile) so we ended up having to ask the front desk for an adapter. A minor pain, but something that I wish I'd known ahead of time. Third, if you're doing some exploring around Swizerland you might want to consider purchasing the half-price tourist pass, which gives you 50% off the price of all train tickets (www.myswitzerland.com/swisshalffarecard). We did this and for 120CHF found it to be worthwhile. Your mileage will vary depending on how much travelling you're doing.

The visit was great fun and I'd highly recommend it to Omega enthusiasts who have the opportunity. I hope some of this information is useful for those who - like me - might be visiting from far-flung places with little idea of what to expect. Of course, if you're planning a visit and any of this isn't clear or you have other questions, please feel free to drop me a DM and I'd be happy to help if I can. Finally, a couple of photos ...

I wore my 105.012-66 CB to the museum. This is the reference worn by Harrison Schmitt during Apollo 17. I was pleased to see that the lunar rover mockup carried the Apollo 17 moonwalkers' names (Schmitt and Cernan), but was a bit confused about why Schmitt's initial is given as "A"? Any ideas?

A clever display about anti-magnetism featuring the Aqua Terra "Bumble-bee" with a moving magnet and a bed of iron filings.

Gene Cernan's 105.003 the movement of which was, supposedly, used as the basis for the reproduced cal. 321. As discussed here: https://omegaforums.net/threads/gene-cernans-speedmaster.91891/ It's curious to note from the photo in the last post in that thread that the display gave the wrong year for Apollo 17 at some stage in the past (1973 versus 1972).