Pickup Watching on a Bicycle: Part Two

As we established in the first iteration of this post, I sometimes ride a bicycle. As the miles roll by on the road, I often see great pickups that I would love to put on this blog, but alas, I am not quick enough to draw my phone. Many interesting trucks escape the short grasp of my POS camera phone. The other day, however, I spotted a truck that was parked in a nice neighborhood. The truck looked like a normal Super Duty Ford dually, but there was something "off" about it. I kept riding, but I turned to Zack, who was riding with me that day.

"Did you see that truck back there?" I asked.

"No, why?"
"It looked like a Ford truck with a van grill," I said with a bit of reservation. I must have been wrong, I thought. But what if I was right? "Lets go back and take a look," I said.

We turned around and went back to the worksite with the truck. Initially we were very confused. We've seen Vans (especially VWs) with the back of their roofs lopped off to make a pickup. We've seen trucks with weird aftermarket grills. Neither of us had ever seen anything quite like this:

There is no doubt that the cab was originally a van. And the bed certainly belongs to a truck. Evidently, what we have here is a Ford Econoline van cab paired with a F-350 Dually (4X4) rear end. This leads us to the obvious question: why? What does the van cab offer that a standard F-350 extended cab doesn't? Is it more luxurious? More roomy? No, I think there is likely an incredible story behind this van-truck.

Perhaps the owner of this gem once owned both an F-350 Dually and a Econoline Van. He had them both parked on his driveway side by side, with the van parked head in, and the truck backed in. A huge semi drove by late one night and destroyed the front half of the truck and the back of the van. The rest is history, I suppose. What would you do with the bed of a truck and the front half of a van?

Or maybe he owned the Van and was driving along one day when he was rear-ended by an F-350 Dually. The F-350's engine and cab wer destroyed. The back half of the van was wrecked beyond repair. Being uninsured, the F-350 owner gave the bed of his truck to the van owner, and they called it even.

I don't know how this happened, but I am very curious.