There’s a good chance you’ve seen an article online over the past few years with pictures – usually heavily Photoshopped – that show hundreds of rusty, half-dismantled, classic American cars parked in a clearing. The shots are usually accompanied by a vague article explaining that they were by American soldiers who went home after World War II and couldn’t take them back for financial reasons. The story seems plausible at first, but it doesn’t add up once you look at the pictures: The vast majority of the cars were built after World War II, so they were evidently not left there by American soldiers in the middle of the 1940s.The Chatillon graveyard has intrigued me for years. I’ve been photographing abandoned cars nearly my entire life, so I jumped at the opportunity to take a Tintin-like trip to Belgium and dig my way to the bottom of the graveyard.This is the full story. Rust, tires, and needles (pine, that is)Chatillon is a small village in southern Belgium located a stone’s throw from the border with France and, in the other direction, Luxembourg.
Below is a list of all cars with their initial stats and cost (Non upgraded). The maximum sale price of the completed vehicle will be about 6x the initial cost, and will depend on the Quality and addons. For Stage kit information, see the individual car pages. This is the twenty-first pack of the cars of Motor City Online. It gives you some more rusty cars of the late 1950s. All cars feature 4 different colors resembling the original factory colors, lights, transparent windows and Washington state license plates of 1968.
It’s your average quiet town in the Belgian countryside, and nothing struck me as unusual when I drove through it for the first time in mid-May. The remains of an abandoned hangar hunker down right in the middle of town, but run-down buildings aren’t exactly a rare sight in Europe.The clearing the cars were in was easy to find because all of the cars are still there on Google Maps; nothing had changed the last time Aerodata International Surveys took the satellite images above the region. It’s on the outskirts of Chatillon, surrounded by fields, dirt roads, and a farm, but the forest is so thick that you can’t see what’s behind the trees unless you walk through them.Walking through the area today defines the term “sobering”; with thousands of parts scattered absolutely everywhere, it looks like the site of a plane crash. Gone are the dozens of rusting air-cooled Volkswagens, the 1953 Pontiac Chieftain, the Renault Dauphine, the Studebaker Champion, the Ford Thunderbird (!).
Gone are the Peugeot 202, the Buick Century, the Opel Olympia, and the Panhard PL 17. Let's talk over friesThere is quite literally only one place to eat in Chatillon, a food truck that makes delicious French fries - a dish that Europeans more commonly associate with Belgium than with France.
While the owner was energetically chopping up potatoes, he mentioned that I was the 11th person to ask him about the cars since he moved to Chatillon four months ago. We’re not talking locals, either, he’s seen people come in from Poland and Ireland, and he even served food to two intrepid adventurers who flew in from China.As luck would have it, a local man I stumbled upon while eating my fries gave me a few basic but precious tidbits of information that pointed me in the right direction. The abandoned hangar in the middle of town that I initially wrote off as yet another countryside relic actually all but explained the cars’ provenance. The building was once a repair shop, and the owner of it used the clearing to store the cars that he kept for parts.By talking to historians, government and city officials, other enthusiasts, and the shop owner’s son, I was able to trace the entire story from beginning to end. 1966In 1965 he publicly announced plans to pull out of NATO, and on March 11, 1966, he went to the American embassy in Paris to announce France’s resignation from the group, asking all NATO forces to leave the country as soon as possible.1967 - 2008By 1967 most soldiers had left Virton. Without a steady diet of American cars to fix, the owner shifted the focus of his shop to European cars. The owner began winding down his business as he got older but he never fully retired.
The cars that were new in the 1950s were now classics so his collection began to attract enthusiasts from Belgium and from a handful of neighboring countries. The shop was still opened when he died approximately eight years ago.
Virton residents quickly adapted to the Canadian way of life: an ice-skating rink was built, bars started serving American and Canadian beer and, of course, huge American cars with Canadian Air Force license plates became a common sight. Generally speaking soldiers didn’t ship the cars over from Canada, they purchased them directly from independent American car dealerships who went through the hassle of importing them from the other side of the Atlantic.The shop in Chatillon was one of a handful of dealers that specialized in selling and fixing American cars. A neighbor who is well into his 80s today told me the garage opened up in the early 1950s and gradually began to sell and repair American cars when the Canadians arrived.
It became particularly successful over the second half of the 1950s because it was relatively close to Virton, especially for Canadians who were used to driving long distances, because the owner had learned how to speak English in order to better communicate with his customers and because he knew American cars far better than anyone else in the region. Parts proved to be a little problematic to find so cars that were wrecked or deemed too old to repair by their owners were usually saved. A collection had begun. French President Charles de Gaulle was worried that NATO would make France and the rest of Western Europe dependent on the United States and Canada for defense. In 1965 he publicly announced plans to pull out of NATO, and on March 11, 1966, he went to the American embassy in Paris to announce France’s resignation from the group, asking all NATO forces to leave the country as soon as possible.Most Canadian soldiers stationed in Marville were transferred to an RCAF base in Lahr, Germany, and the Canadians had all but left Virton by the spring of 1967.
Local army officials asked the owner of the shop to consider moving to Lahr with them because they didn’t think they could find a good mechanic on location. The owner considered the proposition, but his son was still in school so he decided to stay in Chatillon. Without a steady diet of American cars to fix, he shifted the focus of his shop to European cars. It was easier to find parts for, say, a Fiat 600 than a Chevrolet Biscayne, but the mechanic continued hanging on to cars, and at one point there were nearly 400 run-down cars scattered across Chatillon.
The clearing in the forest was full of them, the land around the repair shop was full, there was a small plot of land located next to a farm about 500 yards away from the forest that was chock-full, and the last batch was stored next to a garage on the opposite end of town.The owner began winding down his business as he got older but he never fully retired. The cars that were new in the 1950s were now classics so his collection began to attract enthusiasts from Belgium and from a handful of neighboring countries. The shop was still opened when he died approximately eight years ago.
Killing the graveyardI briefly caught up with the owner’s son in a bid to get his side of the story. He wasn’t terribly interested in helping me piece together the story of the cars in the clearing but it’s hard to blame him, people have been bugging him about them on a regular basis for nearly a decade now. Although I wasn’t able to convince him I wasn’t yet another paparazzi hoping to score a free split-window Volkswagen Bus carcass, he agreed to provide some insight into what’s happened over the past few years.After his father died the cars sat essentially un-touched, he wasn’t a mechanic and he had no interest in taking over the business. The world didn’t know about them yet, the clearing was little more than an overgrown regional junkyard, but everything changed when a Flemish TV station got word of the cars and went out to film a documentary about them in which the host disclosed their exact location. The owner’s son was quick to point out that the documentary wasn’t authorized, his family didn’t find out about it until it after it aired, and he never received a dime in compensation.Almost immediately after the documentary aired throngs of enthusiasts and photographers drove out from all over Belgium to see the cars in person.
Pictures were posted on various sites and forums, and all of the sudden people from all over Europe were lining up in a tiny village that’s barely on the map to get a glimpse of the cars into the clearing. What was once essentially a private collection gradually snowballed into a world-famous tourist attraction. The owner’s son initially tolerated car-savvy photographers treading lightly and taking a few pictures, but things quickly got out of hand and he frequently had to kick groups of over 15 individuals out of the woods. Collectors trekked out to Chatillon in the middle of the night to steal parts, and people went to the clearing to party, leaving litter on the ground and in neighboring fields.
The small house next to the repair shop was broken into more than a few times, too.A city official who asked to remain anonymous told us there was another, perhaps more insurmountable issue to deal with: the owner’s son was the mayor's assistant on environmental matters and his opponents used the cars against him. How can you be credible as a environment-focused politician when you own an open-air junkyard with over 200 cars?The clearing that the cars were parked on was classified as farm land so the junkyard was illegal. The owner’s son’s political opponents took advantage of the zoning issue to take the matter to court and won. Faced with the prospect of getting fined by the region of Wallonia, he decided not to appeal the lawsuit and instead get rid of all of the cars and move on.An old Mercedes-Benz Unimog fitted with a snow plow was used to push the cars out of the forest. They were all crushed, though the owner’s son first invited a few of his father’s good friends and long-time customers to pick out any parts they needed and buy anything that was salvageable, either for parts or for restoration. The whole process took about two weeks.
The owner died about eight years ago, as mentioned above, and the cars have been gone for roughly five so the graveyard didn’t stay abandoned for very long. There are still some signs of the Canadian presence in the area. Notably, there’s a huge totem in downtown Virton that the RCAF gave to city officials before they left in 1967 to thank them for their hospitality. A few of the cars driven by soldiers during the 1950s and the 1960s are still around today, it’s not uncommon to see classic Pontiacs and Lincolns in the area.The Marville army base has been abandoned on and off since France left NATO. Currently, many of the buildings are unoccupied, though a few businesses have set up shop there and – contrary to what city officials like to admit – a handful of families have transformed old army buildings into houses and actually live on the base. Overall it’s turned into a rather decrepit and depressing place, the French version of the Hills Have Eyes could be filmed there.The owner of the shop wasn’t the only Chatillon resident who liked hanging on to old cars, and there’s an abandoned early-1990s Renault Super 5 in a field not too far from the forest.
I consider it a consolation prize for those who take a trip out to Belgium to admire 200 classics and find nothing but tires, rims and pine needles.
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It was a racing MMO that was all about muscle cars. It ran on a cash economy system.
In my opinion, it was pretty damn ahead of it's time. It had really intricate customization (performance and cosmetic) and really fun racing. It had a kickass RNG auction house that would occasionally auction off rare cars and parts, and a player auction house. Such a cool idea, and it was really well implemented. They also had a full damage model, and it cost serious cash to repair a busted car.It was made by EA and was really similar to early NFS games. It was a full purchasable title with a $20 a month subscription fee, pretty steep in retrospect.
But my mom was paying so who cares, right? EA shut down online service in 2003 and killed the game, but it lives on in my memories very fondly. I think it was the last racing game EA made before they started the NFS Underground series. In fact, towards the end of the game's lifespan, they put in a Mitsubishi Eclipse, a Toyota Supra and some other tuner car, presumably to test customization on those types of cars.I was playing this game when I was 8/9 years old, so I may be looking upon it with rose-tinted glasses, but I was soooo sad when they killed the service.Do you guys remember MCO?
Was it actually good? Is there anything else that has come out since that has been similar?
I feel like I haven't thought about this game in a long time, and haven't heard about it in over 10 years. Here's some media on it:(potato quality)(apparently this guy somehow got the game to run in 2012, but he's clearly using a stock car. So tuning functionality is apparently not there.).