Gippsland Vehicle Collection – October 2024

As part of my big Classic Mercedes road trip, I visited the Gippsland Vehicle Collection.   This was a stop on our drive from Melbourne to Bombala via Gippsland and the Monaro Highway. The museum is located in Maffra and is housed in a great historic factory.

One of the nice things about the museum is that the collection changes over time.   As of the time of our visit, the theme was 20th century sports cars.   They had a pretty good collection of them, and the most impressive was the wide range of different 50s MGs on display.

In addition, the museum has a large motorcycle collection, thousands of model cars, signs and even a restored train carriage.  They are also fixing up a model railway.  Plus there are engines on display.

One of the highlights of our visit was one of the staff starting up the American LaFrance Fire truck for us.   It has a six cyilnder engine with three spark plugs driven by both a magneto and a distributor.   Given the age of the vehicle you could see a lot of things happening outside the engine such as the pushrods and distributor shaft.   It made quite the noise.

It is no longer carrying a fire truck body and was most recently used to tour Tasmania, or at least drive from petrol station to petrol station.   The engine is a derivative of the Mercedes Simplex engine developed by Willhelm Maybach for Mercedes-Benz.

I would certainly recommend a visit to the Museum if passing through Gippsland.