If you're interested in trucking history or just enjoy photos of old trucks, here's a website for you: Shorpy Historical Photo Archive at www.shorpy.com.

Just search for "truck" (there's also a Cars & Trucks gallery) and you'll pull up all sorts of interesting old photos, like the one above from 1921 of a truck stuck axle-deep in the mud in Washington, D.C.

There are also often interesting and illuminating comments. For instance, one points out that this is a Walker Electric truck. Another has a bit of information about the American Railway Express company name painted on the side -- fast-parcel service, sort of like UPS or FedEx, but using trains instead of planes.

There's a wonderful color image of field workers in Mississippi circa 1940 showing a red International stake truck; trucks at a produce market in 1941 in Chicago; vintage well drilling in 1904; Santa loading or unloading another Railway Express truck in 1924; a four-wheel-drive hill-climbing demonstration from about 1928; fire trucks and more.

What the heck is a Shorpy? Shorpy.com is a vintage photo blog featuring thousands of high-definition images from the 1850s to 1950s. The site is named after Shorpy Higginbotham, a teenage coal miner who lived 100 years ago near Birmingham, Ala.

You can buy fine-art prints of many of the photos on the site; most are from the Library of Congress research archive, although registered users can post photos as well.