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A car from Disneyland's iconic PeopleMover just sold for nearly half a million dollars

A car from Disneyland's iconic PeopleMover just sold for nearly half a million dollars

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The PeopleMover was a fixture of California's Disneyland for nearly 30 years, a chain of slow-moving, open-air pods on a raised platform that took park goers on a guided tour of Tomorrowland. The attraction closed down in 1995 — but the individual cars are still floating around some 20 years later, it seems.

The Mercury News reports that a PeopleMover car (technically a two-car unit) just sold for $471,500 at an auction in Los Angeles. The auction house, Van Eaton Galleries, has some interesting backstory on this particular unit's provenance: of the 13 cars that are known to exist, none have the actual drive chassis that contains the suspension and wheels. This set has had its chassis recreated from the original specifications, so it can actually move. As an added bonus, "cabin lighting was added in the roofs using reading lamps from a 1967 Rolls-Royce." Working backward from the total number of passengers served by the PeopleMover system during its lifespan, Van Eaton estimates that these cars were probably ridden by somewhere around 1 million visitors.

Though the PeopleMover is long gone from Disneyland, the track is still in place, and Disney has teased that it might be used again at some point in the future. Meanwhile, a similar system is still in use at its sister park — Florida's Disney World — so there's a way to enjoy these things without shelling out a half million.