Tom, thank you for the deeper excursion.
Interesting thoughts floated up in my mind. Here in Russia you can find many really old and ancient memorial objects such as churches, kremlins, monasteries and so on.Some of them are dated as 10 hundreds years old or so. But on the other hand much newer but either vintage artifacts of for example industrial kind are quite scarce.Being in Netherlands I once noted a really old riveted roof structure above a railroad platform. It was in a small city and a local station. But the roof looked vintage, well-cared and solid. In Russia you can seldom see anything really old in service. The most things get redone every 5-15-30 years and many are poor-made structures. Maybe excepting some really large railroad bridges made of steel. And what I dislike nobody estimate such objects as any historical value. Everything working must work and that's all.
Sure there's a reason of shortage of old buildings and so due to the WW2 which took a really large part of the country. Actually you can easily recognize the area of German occupation and non-occuped just be the number of old churches. But The Netherlands were occupied either. And Dutches have those vintage railroad staitions/ Russians - don't.
P.S. The said above has direct relation to old trucks either.