Junkyard Gem: 1959 International Harvester B-110 pickup truck

Everyone likes 1950s and early 1960s American pickups, and you still see a surprising number of them driving around in our current century (there’s a ’53

Ford

F-100 in my Denver neighborhood that

serves as a great test subject

for my beloved old film cameras). Rough ones aren’t worth much, though, particularly if they weren’t made by

GM

or Ford, and so

depressing

quantities

show

up

in

the self-service wrecking yards

I frequent

. Here’s a 1959

IHC B-Series

pickup that worked hard for 60 years before showing up in a Colorado vehicle graveyard.

These days, most of us think of the 1961-1980

International Harvester Scout

when we think of the IHC name, but the company began building trucks all the way back in 1907. With that in mind, I photographed this ’59 with a camera 42 years its senior (see above).

It appears that some junkyard customer coveted the bed of this B-110, removing a camper shell in order to extract it.

1959 was the first model year for the B-Series trucks, and the first year for the IHC 266-cubic-inch (4.4-liter) V8 engine. The Black Diamond straight-six was still standard equipment in the B-110 that year. This truck’s engine had 155 horsepower when new, and probably about 70 after it reached its 500,000th mile.

With no odometer inside, that mileage figure is just a wild guess.

Trucks didn’t need much luxury back in 1959. This box, containing a heater core, is the climate-control system.

IHC trucks were big in

Australia

around this time.