While driving my $500 Postal Jeep through rural Kansas on my way back to Michigan from Utah, I wound up in heaven without even having to crash my Jeep into a giant rusty fireball. That’s because heaven was right off of U.S. 24 near the small, roughly 5,000 person city of Colby, Kansas.
Heaven, as we all know, is simply a large junkyard in the sky filled with rare automotive treasures. Wagoner & Sons salvage yard in Colby, Kansas definitely fits that description (minus the whole “in the sky” thing, but getting hundreds of cars to defy gravity is an understandably difficult thing to do, so I’ll give it a pass). Sadly, I didn’t have much time to chat with Peter, the attendant, and he told me I had to leave Project POStal at the gate anyway since it was “unworthy,” so I just continued on.
Before I left, though, I snagged some photos of the yard, and while I can identify some of the machines in them, I’ll need your help to pick out the rare ones. We’ll begin with some wide-angle shots:
Okay, now we can start creeping in on these machines:
My coworker Jason Torchinsky, a veritable bipedal automotive encyclopedia, pointed out the VW Type 3 Squareback, Beetles, Fiat 850 and, over there on the right, Hillman Imp!
Let’s move a little more to the left. What do we have here by the green F-150?
I inserted the imagine onto Jason Torchinsky’s optical scanners, and a few seconds later came a small slip of paper from his ear canal with the words “Renault Dauphine” printed in wingding font. A Dauphine in Colby, Kansas?!:
Clearly, this salvage yard is incredible, and since I don’t want to crash my vehicle identification machine (you really don’t want to see Jason when he’s rebooting), I figured I’d let you fine readers spot the gems in this field. Here are some photos:
What’s great is that there’s clearly a good mixture of vehicles there, with American muscle, big trucks, and eclectic European rarities all gracing the same divine pasture.
Show us what you found in the comments.