"VERY COOL FIND"

Working on a customers 87 Euro 328, we were removing the interior for a complete re-dye, as we are removing the center console, along with about $4 in change there is a receipt in there very old but in good condition. The date is April 19th 1987 and it appears to be a toll receipt from the Autobahn enterinig in Austria and the toll price was 120.00 DM


I thought it was a very cool find.


Wade

 

That is cool

Usually what you dig out from down there is a green penny with dog hair stuck to it and/or a ballpoint pen full of rusty water.

 

or is that just old British cars?

 

Back when these cars were new we would sometimes find empty mini bottles of Italian origin in them!

 

THat is indeed a way cool find. One can only wonder what happened that day on that road.

 

I was just thinking that sounds like the stuff I find in Jaguars

 

Way cooler than finding an old speeding ticket from the US

 

Mine was a not so cool find................

About 12 years ago I bought a used car and started to pull the interior out for a real good once over. As I pulled the rear seat out I saw this shiny thing....... A bloody syringe with the needle sticking out of it!

Dead set wet myself!

Car was a dog so I sold it inside 6 months. First impressions are quite often a pretty good indicator.

Bob.

 

I already posted this once in another thread, but I got my 86 Mondial cab in Sept 09, and while I was going over it with a fine toothed comb trying to find everything wrong with it, I found a small packet of an illegal drug (white powder-need I say more) in the passenger door pouch. I know of the history on the car and I know it hadn't been driven for 2 years and there were only 1500 miles put on it in the previous 4 years based on the receipts I got. I also know the owner was an older man with kids at high school or early college age, so I don't think it was his. I guess it's not really a 'Cool' find because i don't do the stuff and after all the time it sat in there, I have no idea if it would have been any good. It's just my luck that I would have given it to someone and they would have dropped dead because it turned toxic. Again, not a 'Cool' find, but better that I found it before the cops did after i get my first speeding ticket in it.

 

or crossing borders ...

 

120 DM (West German, I assume)...seems quite expensive for a toll.
Nice find, though. Frame it with a pic of the car.

 

Yup, that was what I thought. DM120 equals about $100. Steep price for toll, especially 22 years ago!

 

I love stories like this.


PDG

 

Keep in mind back in April of 1987 the mark was at 1.8/dollar. Even though that drops the conversion to about $66, that was still a hefty toll.

1987-04-01 1.8118

Rick

 

Don't know of any toll roads in Germany back then. Even today they only recently got the automated system working that charges trucks a toll for Autobahn use.

I'm thinking it may be some other type of receipt. Ticket maybe?

You've probably driven in Germany many times Hans. Do you remember any toll roads? I don't. Hmmm.....

Certainly some of the nearby countries have had road tolls for years but they didn't charge in DM.

 

Here is a scan of the ticket, maybe someone can tell me exactly what it is


Wade
Image Unavailable, Please Login

 

This is toll card from the Brenner Autobahn which is the connecting highway between austria and italy.
Nice road btw drove it serveral times in different Cars.

 

Interesting. It's for Austria but they state German Marks. I suppose they would take German Marks and convert or else it was purchased at the German/Austrian border. It's a large amount of money for that purpose back then so I'm guessing it was good for unlimited passage for a certain number of months or maybe a year. I don't see a start date though. Just a "Good until..." date. Having said that, "Einzelkarte" means single ticket so...... not sure what the deal is. Maybe it was for a big truck or bus full of people but then why would it end up in a car?

 

Back in law skool my buddies and I were always playing tricks on eachother. One day we were all taking a break from academics and went golfing - we stopped at a fish and chips place for something to eat afterwards. Well, my buddy (driver and owner of the car) had to stop on the way home to fill up the gas tank and take a leak - so the rest of us (in the car) took our half-eaten fish sandwiches and left over clam strips and packed them under the dash and up inside the underside of the seats (it was about a 1980 chev malibu).

As you can imagine, the stench got pretty bad over the spring and into the summertime, and we all thought that was pretty funny (although, nobody really wanted to be a passenger in that particular car any more). In the end my buddy had to sell the car because he couldn't stand it any longer - sold it for $400, but he only paid $500 to buy it so it wasn't so bad. About five years later one of us let it slip what we had done that day, and my buddy couldn't stop laughing for a good 30 minutes.....

 

I moved to Europe at the end of 1987 and we regularly were shocked at the cost of tolls. I believe the DM exchange rate at that time was close to 2 so this would be $60. We could drive from Geneva to the french coast on the Porte de Soleil and it was easily over $100 in tolls for that 400km. Of course it would only take 2 hours... I remember all the autoroutes were very expensive on top of 3x for the fuel.

But the tolls for me outside Philly to get to West Chester NY are $16 one way- Of course we are on this path to socialism and but that's another topic altogether...