Day 157 on the Road
The Southern Hemisphere’s Largest Vehicle Collection
Today we are checking out the impressive Bill Richardson Transport World in Invercargill. If you like this video and want to see more 365 Days: 365 Activities, then join our backpacker squad over on YouTube.
Today we are going to see the biggest collection of vintage cars we are ever going to see in our lives.
Today it is raining heaps in Invercargill so we have to find ourselves a rainy day activity in the town and apparently there is the petrol head’s paradise so we are heading to the Bill Richardson Transport World and oh my God this one is huge.
Transport World consists of six shed which are more like giant warehouses covering 15,000sqm. This is one of the most extensive collections of cars in the Southern Hemisphere and the first thing we are seeing is the really rare Dodge RX70 Airflow tanker. This is only one of its kind left in the world.
Everything in Transport World is themed to the extreme and that’s even including the toilets which the guide is taking us to now. The toilets have all sorts of car parts attached to them there’s also a vintage Betty Boop theme in the women’s toilets. We make sure to visit every single toilets in Transport World.
But enough about that nonsense. We are here for the cars and there is a huge variety. It’s absolutely incredible the amount of stuff that they have put into Transport World. There are cars from every single ages from the first like Ford A, B, C or whatever kind of letter there were to some of the later models and it’s really awesome to see them all pristine restored. It’s impossible to take any bad pictures here. Every car is super colourful extremely well restored. It’s quite impressive that they have succeeded to bring back to life so many of those old dodgy rides.
And speaking old dodgy rides, a massive section of the museum is dedicated to old trucks. Although I don’t have a fascination for old trucks it’s quite impressive to see the amount of them that they succeeded to cram into one warehouse. And the massive variety that there is of it. Usually when on the street I just see a big truck and I’m like oh yeah, a big truck, but when you see them all lined up together you can see the different uses the different professions that used those trucks it’s really interesting.
It seems like everything car themed is collected in this museum there is even above the truck section a massive area where they have a massive amount of oil cans.
There’s even a mock up of a street of what Invercargill used to look like back in the day. We’re looking into a workshop which is meant to be representing Bill Richardson’s workshop whose collection this all belongs to and then we’re moving onto our favourite part of the workshop which is the Combi collection. These are all the cars we wish we were travelling around in New Zealand but some of the cars here you can hop into.
This museum was created by a guy called Bill Richardson which started his collection in 1967 and over the years he accumulated over 150 vehicles. When he died in 2005 the family estate came together and decided to create this massive museum in his name.
And we keep on repeating how massive and huge this Transport World is. It’s actually an entire city block. There’s so much here.
There’s more she says.
Like we said before, we’re not exactly petrol heads but it’s really hard to not be impressed by the huge scale of this vehicle collection. And also there’s a huge amount of petrol pumps to look at as well which actually look for like science experiments than petrol pumps.
As we’re moving through the collection we do see some rare oddities as well such as this interesting hand signal for indication as well as few chassis and trucks put together and then we’re moving onto the agriculture side of things with a few vintage tractors and farming machinery.
All the farming machinery is a new addition to Transport World and it’s really an interesting addition of that because it tells us a lot about the farming industry in New Zealand and how much everything has evolved. It’s impressive how intricate the machines have become and how simple they were back in the days.
And because every single petrol head needs somewhere to send his wife to so he can check out all the cars, there is also a women’s section of Transport World and this is the WOW. WOW stands for World of Wearable Art and it’s a pretty big thing here in New Zealand. It’s taking recyclable material and making something crazy out of it. And that wraps up our time here at the Bill Richardson Transport World and it looks like tomorrow we’re gonna have to find some more rainy day activities to do in Invercargill so make sure to join us then.
Robin? What’s going on in here? Have you seen my toilet seat? That’s pretty epic isn’t it? Get out.
