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Lane Motor Museum

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Photos by Steve Purdy

The Lane Motor Museum in Nashville, Tennessee is one of our favorite car museums because it is one of the most unusual. Here you will see no Packards or Deusenbergs or Stutz. Rather you’ll see Citroen, Messerschmidt, Tatra, Skoda, Helecron and dozens of other makes of which even dedicated car aficionados may not be familiar.

Jeff Lane presides over a collection of about 400 cars, bicycles, motorcycles and other vehicles that defy categorization. About 150 of those are on display and well annotated in the large, well-lit main space of a retired bread factory on Murfreesboro Pike, right near the intersection of I-24 and I-40.

Another 250 are packed in the lower storage area.

Both floors have workspaces and a well-stocked library provides resource material for the study of all these treasures.

What ties this collection of interesting odd-balls together is out-of-the-box design and engineering that attempt to solve a variety of transportation challenges, including propulsion systems, economics, structural configurations, fuel systems and an array of often indefinable elements.

This collection celebrates those who attempted creative solutions. Some did not work so well, but that does not make them any less collectable or less worthy of preservation in Lane’s view.

This is a car museum we can recommend without hesitation. It is closed each Tuesday and Wednesday, but is open every other day from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Special arrangements must be made to see the cars in storage on the lower level,but the main collection will soak up your day.

Get the details at the museum’s website.

Steve Purdy
Steve Purdy
Steve Purdy has been writing about and photographing cars, both old and new, for over 30 years. His words and images have appeared in more than a dozen publications and his photos have been featured in a variety of galleries. He has been involved in radio, film and TV projects as well including the creation of his own radio show about automobiles and motorsports that is currently part of the Web-based Michigan Business Network. His first love is classic and collector cars which, he says, represent the best in automobile aesthetics.

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