New Zealand: Invercargill – Bill Richardson’s Transport World

🚛 Bill Richardson’s World of Transport

Bill Richardson’s World of Transport had been recommended with the sort of hushed reverence usually reserved for cathedrals or decent bacon. So when the weather turned properly miserable, we made a beeline for it. Our tyres sliced through puddles with all the optimism of people fleeing hypothermia. If ever there was a day to seek refuge among large bits of polished metal, this was it.

The museum was the life’s obsession of Bill Richardson, a Southland transport magnate who began collecting trucks when most sensible men his age were content with gardening or developing strong opinions about the council. What started as a hobby became something closer to a benevolent mechanical empire. He began acquiring old commercial vehicles at a time when many were being scrapped without ceremony. New Zealand’s road transport history was being quietly erased as companies modernised their fleets, and Richardson, perhaps sensing a cultural amnesia setting in, stepped in to save it.

Southland, after all, has long been a land of engines and endurance. The region’s farming backbone relied on sturdy lorries capable of hauling wool, timber and livestock across long distances in challenging weather. These vehicles were not ornaments; they were lifelines. By preserving them, Richardson preserved the story of how the region quite literally moved.

The collection grew magnificently out of control. It now holds hundreds of trucks, petrol pumps, transport artefacts, recreated workshops and entire period shop displays. It also leans proudly into the legend of Burt Munro, the Invercargill engineer whose heavily modified Indian motorcycle became world famous for speed attempts on the salt flats of Utah. The film The World’s Fastest Indian brought that story to international audiences, but here in Southland the tale was always local folklore: a man in a shed, tinkering with machinery until it either went faster or detonated in protest.

Our visit unfolded as a slow, increasingly stunned shuffle. First the reception — promising — then the main hall, where we were immediately confronted by row upon row of gleaming vintage trucks polished so thoroughly you could probably check your cholesterol in the reflection.

Tiny early delivery vans stood beside colossal mid-century road beasts in heroic colours. Fire engines gleamed in immaculate red. Buses with curved roofs and proud chrome grilles looked ready to trundle off to collect schoolchildren who had long since grown up and retired. There were recreated garages complete with tools laid out as though the mechanic had simply popped out for a cup of tea. Cabinets displayed enamel signs, petrol globes, badges and mechanical paraphernalia that would send any retired engineer into a gentle emotional spiral.

The restoration quality was borderline ridiculous. Every bolt, dial and paint stripe had been fussed over with forensic dedication. These were not dusty relics; they were working pieces of industrial art. Each vehicle looked capable of starting immediately and heading off down the road — which is frankly more than can be said for most modern technology after a software update.

We drifted from hall to hall muttering, “good lord” and “they don’t build them like that now,” which is what British men over sixty automatically say when confronted with anything both old and functioning. By the end we were almost overwhelmed. It was superb — genuinely one of those accidental travel highlights discovered purely because the weather bullied you indoors.