What do you do when your 1975 to 1978 Mercury Marquis just isn’t big enough to haul all the kids? You get out the cutting saw and put another row of seats in it!
A google search for “Mercury six door limo” yields a lot of oddities, even a stretched AMC Ambassador wagon, but nothing about any Marquis like this. Even variations of this search revealed nothing, so if you know anything about the history of such a Mercury, please speak up.
This was off in the corner of a salvage yard I drove by, leading me to suspect it isn’t being squashed–for the time being. The two drag lines in the background were quite busy at the time I saw this.
Yes, I like big Ford’s and Mercury’s of this vintage, but this puppy would be hard to park in most garages and would need forty acres to turn around. A CC on a normal Marquis of this vintage can be found here.
Trailer park limo
HMMM… Better than living in a shed, and it still has all of its doors.
Now THIS is a car to make your kid learn to parallel park in. 🙂
Wow. I do know that Armbruster Stageway used to do stretch Lincolns in this era. I worked for a place that had two of them, a 78 and a 79 IIRC, both 6 door sedans.
However, as I recall them, the coachbuilder did a much more elegant job on the roofline than is evident on this Mercury. The dents and multiple colors doesn’t help here, but that roof looks sort of cobbled together rather than really designed. Every Stageway or A-S stretch I have ever seen does a much nicer job on the roof than is on this car, making me suspect that someone else built this one.
One of our neighbors bought a used Panther-based limo for a song and use it to haul their family around the way most of us might have used a minivan.
Oh, and those are “material handlers” in the background, not draglines… (c:
So true; the day job injects itself. All machines like this are still classified as draglines despite the term being as archaic as can be in these instances.
This is a dragline:
Those are definately not draglines. They are scrap handlers or material handlers, based on hydraulic excavators. A drag line is a version of a crawler crane using cables to pull a bucket or scoop.
That being said, very interesting find.
This thing had to be either an airport limo or a family car for a funeral home.too cheap to spring for something built by the likes of Superior, Hess & Eisenhardt or Armbruster.
It looks like its being excavated…
For a second I thought it was a 6 door hardtop….wouldn’t that be awesome, a hardtop limo. I know that they made 1 hardtop 1956 Fleetwood 75 for Mrs. Eisenhower.
“Uncle Bob’s DIY Limo Kit (TM), Putting The ‘Grand’ In Your Marquis Since Forever”
In fact, that Marquis has been abandoned in that very spot since 1976. Private detective Frank Cannon chased it to that location, until it became bogged down in the sand. Anthony James was the limo driver and John Colicos was the villain riding in the back. Cannon apprehended them as they tried to escape by climbing that chain link fence in the foreground.
Ah yes, I remember, Leslie Nielsen played the crooked doctor….
I believe that is the elusive Mercury Muy Grande Marquis.
Grande Grand Marquis
I saw something very similar to this in my local Pick-A-Part several years back. It was stretched like the one above, painted bright red with a white interior. The roof had been neatly and expertly sawed off.
I suspect it was either a parade or music video car- maybe both.
In Latin America and perhaps the US, Panther Grand Marquis limousines have been used.
http://www.imcdb.org/vehicles_make-Mercury_model-Grand+Marquis+Stretched+Limousine.html
Many years ago, like ~20 or so, GM stretch limo that did airport duty in my area, I’d see it on the freeway fairly frequently on its way to or from SeaTac. It was a typical style stretch w/o an extra pair of doors.