I Took My Adorable Japanese Kei Van To An Insane Car Show With 500 Cars, Trains, Buses, And Glorious Semi-Trucks

Over the weekend, I did something I haven’t done in many years and took a car to a car show. The Illinois Railway Museum hosted its 33rd Annual Vintage Transport Extravaganza, one of the largest gatherings of vintage vehicles in the whole state. I took my cutie 1989 Suzuki Every van and while I was the only Kei car there, the show itself was insane. There were cars as far as the eye could see and the variety was bonkers from pre-war classics to giant buses and semi-tractors. This is a car show everyone will want to go to.

Admittedly, I’m not much of a car show person. There appear to be two types of car shows in the Midwest. The first type is the classic car show, where the same Dodge Chargers, Mazda RX-7s, Ford F-100s, and “Tri-Five” Chevrolets show up every time. There’s nothing wrong with these shows and nothing wrong with these cars, but once you go to about five of them you’ll realize you’ve already seen everything.

On the other end of the scale is the modern car show, like Supercar Saturdays. At those shows you’ll see endless rows of Ford Mustangs, Jeep Wranglers, Lamborghini Huracans, McLarens, Volkswagen GTIs, Factory Fives, Maseratis, and Teslas. If you’re lucky, a guy shows up in his Bugatti Veyron or some ultra-rare car. Again, go to about five of these and you’ve seen them all.

That’s why I was blown away by the Vintage Transport Extravaganza. There was literally something for everyone in there from a Bricklin SV-1, to a Mack truck, to what was an absolutely perfect Chevrolet Lumina.

More Cars And Trains Than You Can Handle

The host for the 33rd Annual Vintage Transport Extravaganza was the Illinois Railway Museum. I’ve written about this place a number of times since discovering it in 2022 and that’s because IRM continues to be one of those places where you cannot visit just once. There’s always something fun going on at IRM and the museum is always doing new or different things to keep visits fresh.

The Illinois Railway Museum is currently America’s largest operating train museum and its scale has to be witnessed in person. I can tell you that the museum has over 500 pieces of rail equipment, 100 acres of land, huge barns, countless running diesel locomotives, two operational steam locomotives, and an impressive roster of working electric cars. I can also tell you that the museum has about 5 straight miles of mainline track, 100 acres of land, colossal barns, and impressive teams of rail enthusiasts to restore the equipment and run the whole operation.

It’s also notable that IRM is an active railroad with the reporting mark IRMX. I’ve also been told that IRM can be a gateway to learning how to become an engineer. That’s right, while many of IRM’s countless volunteers are railroaders, you don’t have to be a railroader to contribute. They will teach you how to operate a locomotive! I got a taste of that last year when I got to take the controls of a vintage Alco.

All of this is even more incredible when you realize that the museum was started 71 years ago by ten railfans who just wanted to save their favorite interurban, the Indiana Railroad Number 65.

Everything IRM does is on a scale as grand as the museum itself. Other railroad museums might take you on a slow loop of the campus while IRM takes you down its long line, giving you a glimpse into what riding the rails was like up to and beyond a century ago. So, when IRM hosts a car show, it’s going to be huge.

IRM has been running the Vintage Transport Extravaganza for 33 years and the museum says that not only is the car show one of the largest ones in the state of Illinois, but it’s one of those unique experiences you won’t get elsewhere. I mean, there aren’t many car shows where you’ll be able to look at a Model T-Bucket hot rod one moment and ride behind a classic diesel-electric locomotive the next.

IRM says the Vintage Transport Extravaganza collects some 500 vehicles each year and it’s one of the largest events at the museum. After going there myself yesterday, I can tell you that the museum isn’t lying. It might even be understating things.

The Hottest Test For A Little Van

It’s been several years since I last entered a car into a car show. I think my last car show, excluding model-specific rallies, might have been in 2014 when I entered my 2012 Smart Fortwo into Chicagoland’s Supercar Saturdays. If we’re counting a model-specific rally, that was 2016 when I took my 2012 Smart Fortwo to Dubuque, Iowa for a Smart rally.

Regardless, it’s been a really long time since I took a car to a car show. Most of it is timing. I have no desire to wake up at 6 am on a weekend to get to a show by 8 am or 9 am. Another factor is that I’ve just stayed out of local car communities since starting my transition a decade ago. Not everyone is as excellent as an Autopian is and it’s easy to feel unwelcome in local communities.

Aside from the occasional LGBTQ motorcycle show, I’ve been riding entirely solo. That has gotten pretty lonely, so I’ve been beginning to branch out. It started with me showing up to Cars & Coffee Milwaukee last year and now I’m a part of some online groups. So, taking a car out to a show for the first time in so many years is pretty big for me.

I’ve had the Vintage Transport Extravaganza on my calendar for months. The biggest question for someone with a fleet of 20 or more vehicles is what vehicle to bring to a show like this. IRM says the show was open to anything 2003 or older, so that knocked out my entire fleet of Smarts, the Saturn Sky Red Line, all of my Volkswagens, and most of the BMWs.

However, that did leave me with an interesting list of vehicles. My Honda Beat and my Suzuki Every qualified, as did my teal BMW airhead motorcycle, the Suzuki RE-5, the Nova Bus RTS-06, and my newly acquired ’48 Plymouth. Weirdly, my 2003 BMW X5 was also eligible. Look, it’s weird that beautiful modern BMW is now technically a “classic.”

I originally planned on bringing my Suzuki RE-5, but Sheryl’s car is in the shop and I wanted to bring drinks and tools, so it wasn’t going to work. I chose a backup, my 1989 Suzuki Every. I imported this cute and somewhat rusty Kei van from Japan back in 2021. Since then, I haven’t done a whole lot with it. I’ve driven the van around locally and that’s about it. Admittedly, it’s not really fast enough to take on long trips, so it’s best as a fun toy to take to the beach or something like that.

It never really hit me that my Every van would be a great car show vehicle. So, I pulled it out of my warehouse, pumped up the tires, tossed in Sheryl and a bunch of tools, and then hit the road. I even stole Sheryl’s Star Trek IDIC license plate and had it transferred over.

I’ve said this in the past, but driving this tiny van on American roads is frankly ridiculous. The Suzuki Every is the van version of the Suzuki Carry Kei truck. It sports a 547cc inline triple with all of 52 horses to its name. Now, the van weighs just 1,900 pounds wet, so 52 horses aren’t the worst thing in the world. However, my van has quite the hilarious setup. First gear is a granny low that gets you to maybe 10 mph before you have to shift gears. Fifth gear feels more like an overdrive than anything. Every gear is super short on top of that.

Oh, and then the intercooled turbo kicks in at around 2,500 RPM and it’s definitely an old-school setup. It’s all lag until around 2,500 RPM or so, then you get a solid kick in the rear as a glorious green “TURBO” light illuminates in the instrument cluster. The engine is also right under you, too, so you hear that little spooling up and blowing off like every tuned car you see rolling down the road, but it’s packaged in a van barely larger than a Smart Fortwo.

So, this is a van that has you rowing gears like a trucker as it sounds like you’re racing down a track at full chat, yet you’re going just 30 mph. Cruising speed is 55 mph and the engine sounds a bit angry at 60 mph. Redline is around 65 mph and you’re banging the rev limiter around 68 mph or 70 mph.

So, it’s not a vehicle for highways and just barely a vehicle for country roads. Weirdly, the engine still has plenty of power in reserve here, so the low top speed is purely a gearing thing.

We arrived at IRM sometime after 10 am and it was a rockstar from the very start. The vast majority of the cars at this show were all kinds of domestics. The turnout of cars from the Big Three were large enough to warrant their own sections. Heck, there were so many trucks alone that they had a section larger than what Ford got. There was even a large enough showing of Studebakers, Packards, and Avantis to have their own little area.

Yet, the only import brands with a big enough showing were Volkswagen and Triumph. Everyone else shared a section. Despite the sheer size and variety of this car show, I was the only Kei vehicle. More than that, I was the only JDM import, period. My neighbors were a Ferrari, a Jaguar, and an Audi.

Sheryl and I stuck around the van for a while and it was clear that the van was probably the favorite of the import section. Kids thought the van was oh-so cute while adults were fascinated about everything about it. Some asked me how it got to America while many others asked where the other half was. If I had a thousand bucks for every time I got some sort of “other half” joke, I wouldn’t have to pay rent for years. My common response was “I get the other half when it’s paid off.” That’s an old joke from the days when Smarts were still new in America.

I think I was most impressed by the van’s cooling performance. It was over 90 degrees yesterday and I ran that engine close to redline for extended periods. Yet, the temperature gauge rose only a little bit, getting nowhere near the unsafe range. Not bad for an old van!

Everything Else

Okay, enough about my van, what about the other stuff? I’ll admit that what you’re seeing isn’t my best camera work. I was practically melting in the heat yesterday, so I wasn’t about to get 30 shots per car. Still, take a look!

Here are some of the rigs from the truck section:

Some fabulous Studebakers:

A lonely Saab:

Pre-war classics:

A Kaiser enjoying some shade:

And three privately owned buses! I wrote about that exact Routemaster a few years ago:

Also, don’t forget that IRM is still a train museum, so if 500 cars, trucks, and buses weren’t enough, you were then able to ride an assortment of electric interurban cars, streetcars, a coach pulled by a steam engine, and a vintage bi-level commuter train!

Sheryl and I had so much fun at the Vintage Transport Extravaganza that we want to make it a yearly tradition. I’ve decided that I want to debut the Plymouth Special Deluxe at next year’s show, so that should give me the motivation to work with some decent speed on the project.

If you happen to be in northern Illinois, you should make some time to visit the Illinois Railway Museum. I don’t care what you stop doing to make it over here because it’ll be worth it. Next weekend is going to be a big one, too, as the museum is hosting its Diesel Days weekend, where the museum will showcase a stunning display of more thundering diesel-electric power than you’ll see anywhere else. Trust me, you don’t want to miss it! If you’re out there, you’ll see me, too!