Lonely Old Garage.

 

Just as there is something oddly charming about an old abandonded car, I am always drawn to old abandonded garages. While I would certainly prefer to see small local fix-it shops continuing to repair old cars and help keep them on the road, these old relics have a special appeal.

This garage is close to where I live, and I have driven by it countless times over the years. I finally stopped to take a few pictures this past weekend. This garage had also been a service station, as evidenced by the broken gas pumps out front. The building and pumps may not be ancient, but they certainly are from at least a few decades ago, and haven't been in use for quite a while.

There is a small tidy house right next door that appears to belong to the same owner, and the grass around the shop is kept trimmed. I spied an old car inside, but otherwise the garage looked empty. The 'Toutes Marques' sign above the building explained that the garage serviced all brands.

The old, worn-out gas pumps still had their prices labelled in French francs, which were phased out in favour of the euro by 2002, so this station certainly hasn't seen any action in at least 12 years. As a dreamer I like to think that someone will someday open up this garage again, but I know that it's not very likely.

While there will always be a call for small automotive repair shops to take care of old collectible cars, the days where people stopped by their local shop for general repairs is gone. The complexity of new cars means that they need to be serviced in specialised shops and dealerships, and a small, traditional garage like this one simply doesn't have its place in the modern automotive world. As for the gas pumps, just a minute further down the road is a modern gas station that belongs to a major chain. There's little room left for the small guy in the modern automotive service world!

Still, I hope that this building and its pumps will stand for years to come, as a nostalgic reminder to a different motoring era.