Eight experiences. One story about motion.
The Motion Museum is organized around eight major experiences, each telling its own piece of the story — and each currently taking shape on our construction floor. None of what’s below exists yet; think of this as a preview of the plan, not a photograph of the finished museum. Between the working model railroads, full-scale vehicles, and touchable galleries, this is being built as a museum of genuinely hands-on experiences, with interactive exhibits woven through nearly every hall — so when you’re searching for museums near me, we’re aiming to be the answer.
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![A detailed miniature model of Chattanooga, Tennessee, featuring a mountain landscape with a waterfall, a train passing through, buildings, and a lookout tower atop a mountain, with visitors observing and reading informational signs.]()
The Walk Through Time
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![A museum exhibit space with a vintage airplane, classic cars, and a large screen showing racing images. Visitors are viewing the displays, which include a steam locomotive model and various vehicles, under a wooden vaulted ceiling with spotlights.]()
The Hall of Motion - Route 66
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![An indoor display of Thomas the Tank Engine and friends, featuring a model train layout, signs, and children exploring.]()
The Pop Culture Galleries
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![Museum exhibit featuring a large model of an offshore oil rig with a waterfall and a waterfall and waterfall in the background. Several visitors are observing the display and chatting.]()
The Off Shore Oil Rig
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![Visitors exploring an exhibition about transportation history, with displays of model ships, information panels, and a holographic projection of two men with an airplane model.]()
The International Transportation Hall of Fame
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![People browsing a room with model train layout and train books at junction model emporium, coffee shop in the corner.]()
The Hobby Shop
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![Exhibit at a museum showcasing video game history with vintage and modern simulators, screens of video games, and visitors including children and adults exploring gaming displays.]()
The Pop Culture Galleries
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![Museum exhibit showing a large interactive global logistics and supply chain map with miniature cityscape and model ships and bridges in the foreground, and visitors observing and pointing at the display.]()
The American Port
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![Exhibit display of modern farm equipment including tractors, harvesting combines, and specialized machinery in a museum exhibit with visitors observing and interactive displays.]()
The Pop Culture Galleries
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![A detailed scale model of a futuristic cityscape with tall skyscrapers, green spaces, a waterfront with boats, and an airport with planes, displayed at a museum exhibit.]()
Future Exhibit 2063
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![Children playing in a princess-themed adventure exhibit with boats, a pink ride-on car, and castle decor, part of the 'Princess's Journey' interactive outpost at a museum.]()
The Pop Culture Galleries
What we are building…
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Stand next to the real thing.
Our building's central hall holds full-scale, hero-sized vehicles arranged as a walk-through of transportation history — a locomotive, a classic highway semi-truck (a nod to the I-75 corridor right outside our doors), a vintage aircraft, a stagecoach, and more. This hall doubles as our premier event space for evenings and gatherings once we're open, including planned after-hours museum events for members and the community.
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Honoring the people who shaped how the world moves.
A cinematic hallway of rotating honorees — engineers, pilots, freight and logistics leaders, automotive icons, maritime captains, and the women and men who moved transportation forward, from right here in the region and around the world. Annual induction events, along with an ongoing lecture series and workshops featuring historians and industry voices, will make this an evolving destination, not a one-time exhibit.
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Walk through 250 years of how this region moved.
The largest G-scale layout in the world — a continuous, immersive walk spanning five eras: 1800–1850, the Cherokee and earliest settlers; 1850–1900, the Civil War and Reconstruction; 1900–1950, the Greatest Generation and the airplane; 1950–2000, the Jet Age; and 2000–2026, the Modern Age.
Every train on the layout runs on battery power — onboard receivers, no track wiring, and extruded polycarbonate rail that never needs cleaning — with the whole railroad conducted from a single laptop.
This installation is being developed in direct partnership with Cherokee Nation cultural advisors to ensure the region's full history is told with the care it deserves.
Coming to life on our construction floor now — check the Build Out feed for progress.
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Where our historical walk-through hands off to what's next. An HO-scale Mars colony with robotic rovers, a Moon colony served by futuristic model trains, an extraterrestrial-life kiosk station, a planetarium-style LED ceiling overhead, and a retro-futuristic sky city layout imagining how we'll get around a century from now.
Speculative, playful, and grounded in real space and transportation research — this exhibit treats the future the same way the rest of the museum treats the past: as a story worth telling in detail, with interactive science exhibits that make the physics of space travel tangible for younger visitors.
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Where the story starts, out past the harbor.
An operating HO-scale offshore oil rig stands watch off the coast — the opening chapter of a working logistics story that continues right next door at The American Port. Built and run to the same operating-session standard as our other layouts, told at 1:87 scale.
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Follow a container from ship to rail, in 1:87.
Modeled after the Port of Savannah — the Southeast's busiest gateway — this operating HO-scale port works below The Offshore Oil Rig, complete with ship-to-shore cranes, intermodal ladder tracks, and unit trains threading the yard to operating-session standard.
Stand at the fascia and follow a container from ship to rig to flatcar — the logistics story that gives I-75 its meaning, told in miniature.
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From your first toy train to your grown-up collection.
Two stories of hands-on exhibit space that follow transportation through toys, film, and collecting — from a hands-on floor built for kids and families, to an upstairs level for adult model-railroad and collector enthusiasts, to a dedicated space celebrating transportation's biggest moments on screen. Built around genuinely hands-on experiences and touchable displays, this gallery is designed to be one of the most engaging kids museum activities in the region.
Specific collections and franchises featured in this gallery will be announced as licensing and acquisition details are finalized.
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A real hobby shop, not a gift-shop shelf.
At the back of the building, a dedicated model-train retail shop with its own entrance, staffed by working modelers — plus a café and reading room built for hobbyists to linger, meet, and swap stories. We'll be standing up a regional model railroad club here well before the doors open, along with a rotating lecture series and workshops on modeling and railroad history; see our Volunteer page if you want to help build that community from day one.