Another hour’s worth of driving and we arrive at MOTAT, a fairly sprawling facility next to the Western Springs Stadium. The parking is a bit challenging as we can’t really find a lot, just a few parallel spaces on Stadium Road. We do manage to find an easy space, though, and walk around the fenced perimeter into the front entrance.
MOTAT operates two sites – the Transportation section where we start our tour, and the Aviation area a bit down the road. There is an historic tram that will take you between the two sites. Since we are here, we start with Transportation and meander our way through the displays. The first building we visit is the Western Springs Pumphouse, the first building in New Zealand to receive a UNESCO award. It’s a beautiful brick building with the original wood flooring and original pumphouse located on 3 levels. There are educational videos about the pumps, and how they were reconstructed here. There are also lots of steam engines on display from different eras. One of the most interesting is an engine that was once used to power a ferry. The ferry sunk after it was broadsided and sliced in half by a mail boat, but the engine was salvaged, repaired and then put into storage. Years later, a dairy purchased it to use in its processing plant.
Next we explore the Discovery Dome which has a huge exhibit on Sir Edmund Hillary’s Antarctic expedition. Oh, I could stay here for hours. But unfortunately we don’t have that kind of time. It’s enough for us to skim over the material and read about the use of tractors and other machinery they used to travel across the frozen tundra to the South Pole. There’s a great video in there too.
Leaving the Antarctic display, we wander through the other rooms with old fire station equipment, telecommunications history and then a print shop. That brings us both back to our roots – Ed says it smells just like the Press, I’m taken back to my printing/press run days with DDVA. There are old block type printers and an original Heidelberg. Neat.
Then it is back out into the fresh air to wander around the historic MOTAT village with replicas and actual historic cottages where engineers and settlers lived.
We tour a couple of old tram cars, then hit the restrooms, skirting all the kid’s areas to arrive at the front gate to await the tram to take us over to the aviation section. The tram takes about 5 minutes to get to the other facility, on the way passing the Western Springs park and the Auckland Zoo.
Once at the Aviation museum, we set the timer on our phones to make sure we don’t miss the last tram back at 4:45. That would be ugly – walking back to the car is not an option we want to consider.
The aviation museum has a great collection of historical planes. Everything from war planes to bizarre little “airtruk”planes -
to old passenger planes –
all housed inside the immense hangar like building.
This is a great way to spend the end of our last day here in New Zealand. We are waiting for the tram way before our alarm goes off, and are dropped off in front of the transport museum with plenty of time to make our way to the airport. We noticed that the museum is looking for tram driver volunteers. This is the perfect job for Ed if we decide to emigrate! What better way to spend his time than driving his beloved trams/trolleys around the museum. That’s a plan.
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