One of our favorite hobbies on road trips is car spotting, where you scan the backwoods and corn fields for abandoned automobiles rotting away. Many of these vehicles have long been forgotten about, and their neglect tugs at the heartstrings of car enthusiasts the world over. This is not just an American phenomenon though. Saudi Princes and paupers alike have been known to collect cars only to have them rust away, as do our neighbors to the north, Canada.

Jalopnik came across these photos from Flickr user Flat-Black 66, who discovered a treasure trove of neglected cars situated under an overpass in Montreal a few years ago. So what is the story behind these cars, why were they been sitting here so long, and what happened to them?

The cars were located in the north end of Montreal beneath the Trans Canada Highway (we didn’t know they had one of those). The cars appeared to be in good condition for the most part, with most being completely intact and looking like they were running, driving vehicles at the time they were parked. However, many of these cars were sitting for such a very long time that the obvious signs of neglect, such as flat tires and the beginning stages of rust, startedto take hold. Being located under a major highway, these vehicles are also covered in many years of road salt, which speeds up the oxidization process as anybody in the snow-belt can attest to.

Jalopnik thinks, and with good reason, that the cars may belong to a local Montreal car dealership chain. Many traded-in vehicles that can’t be resold are simply shuffled off to the back lot, sometimes sent to the scrapper, sometimes sitting around for decades as appears to be the case here. These cars spanned many decades of automotive styling, and we saw more than a few muscle cars mixed in, including what looked to be a Buick GS. Recently though, these vehicles were removed from beneath the overpass and were taken to a nearby lot where, it is thought, the vehicles might actually be undergoing a restoration via the aforementioned dealership. If so, this story has a happy ending. If not, well, where did all these classic cars (please don’t say the scrapper.)