Thousands of automobiles rust away in Sweden's classic car graveyard

Inside this forest lies 1,000 forgotten cars from the 1950s - a vintage car collector's dream which has been left to rust.The scrapyard was established by two brothers to store cars abandoned by servicemen during the Second World War now lies neglected. Rusting classic cars including vintage Opels, Fords, Volvos, Buicks, Audis, Saabs and a Sunbeam litter the natural undergrowth. Hikers have discovered trees growing around bodywork and moss covering seats and steering wheels. The forgotten vintage vehicles are worth an estimated £100,000 in scrap value alone.Photographer Svein Nordrum, 54, ventured into the dense woods to photograph the abandoned vehicles. Mr Nordrum said: 'It is very quiet in there. It is a strange feeling when you're there, as if you're on the edge of the world.'The forest is very dense. You can only see a couple of cars at any one time - the rest disappear into the woods.'Two Swedish brothers founded the scrap yard in the 1950s to break down vehicles which had been abandoned by American soldiers leaving Europe after the Second World War.They then sold on spare parts for repairs.The brothers had a house each among the forest of broken automobiles.They continued to trade until the 1980s before they abandoned the site in the 1990s leaving the forest undergrowth to claim the cars.Mr Nordrum said: 'The cars are now a part of nature in a way. The trees grow all over and through the cars, with branches sneaking through windows and over the bonnets.'The car graveyard is just in the county of Bastnas, a mining town in southern Sweden.The 1,000 corroded vehicles are collectively worth an estimated £100,000 in scrap but efforts to remove the cars from the forest have been thwarted.Mr Nordrum said: 'Some people in Sweden want to remove the cars, but environmentalists keep stopping them. 'Apparently birds and other animals have made nests in the bodywork.'A spokesperson for ASM Auto Recycling, a UK-wide car salvage company, said: 'The standard price for scrap metal is about £100 a ton, so 1000 cars would be worth about £100,000 in scrap.'The price of metal goes up and down. An average car would be worth around £100 in scrap at the moment, but it changes from time to time.'(dailymail.co.uk)ANN.Az