Ever wondered what happens to aircraft, locomotives, passenger liners and cars when they reach the end of their useful life? The vast majority of vehicles live out their final days in scrapyards to await recycling or simply rust away. They're eerie, fascinating and – at times – quite spectacular places.

Scroll through the gallery to discover the eye-opening places where modes of transportation go to die. To enjoy these images FULL SCREEN on a desktop, click the icon in the top right...

These include an arid desert climate, high elevation, low pollution levels and alkaline soils, all of which inhibit rust and erosion. The boneyard stores thousands of commercial planes.

These range from aircraft that are beyond any state of repair to planes that will eventually be returned to active service, such as Qantas' fleet of Airbus A380s, which were returned to the airline after three years in storage.

Storage works out at around £6,100 ($8,000) per aircraft, per month, so the costs to airlines can mount up considerably. In addition to planes manufactured by the likes of Boeing and Airbus, the boneyard stores a variety of aircraft including McDonnell Douglas and Lockheed Martin planes.

If you're keen to visit, the boneyard isn't actually open to the general public per se but does put on monthly 'Plane Crazy Saturdays' during which enthusiasts can tour the now bulging facility and find out more about its activities. Admission is free.

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The 309th Aerospace Maintenance and Regeneration Group (AMARG), to give the boneyard its official name, was set up after World War II and is now the only repository of decommissioned military and government aircraft in the country.

The boneyard has featured in a number of TV shows and movies, including the film Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. While the base is usually out of bounds to the general public, it does occasionally open its gates, putting on spectacular events like the Thunder & Lightning Over Arizona Air Show.

The adjacent Pima Air & Space Museum is a fascinating place to learn about aircraft old and new.

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The Teruel facility stores and dismantles planes manufactured by Airbus, Boeing, Bombardier and other leading names in the global aviation industry. 

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Although Australia's national carrier Qantas stored some of its planes here during the COVID-19 pandemic, it has for reasons unknown opted to continue keeping its planes at the Mojave Desert facility in California. Despite this, the Alice Springs boneyard has no shortage of clients.

The facility's leading customers are airlines based in the Asia-Pacific region and have included Fiji Airways and Singapore Airlines. During the pandemic, Singapore Airlines stored six of its Airbus A380 super jumbo jets at the Australian facility, but some of these have since returned to service.

This remarkable train cemetery is situated a couple of miles (3km) outside the Bolivian town of Uyuni, not far from the world's largest salt flats. A key tourist attraction, the cemetery usually draws visitors from far and wide, eager to capture its eerie ambience on film.

During the late 19th century, Uyuni was a major transport hub for Bolivia's mining industry. Commodities mined in the area were transported to the coast from the hub, and a railway was built by a team of British engineers.

The hub and rail network were championed by Bolivia's great and good (including the then-president Aniceto Arce) and the Uyuni area would have been buzzing with activity during this era.

However, the boom times didn't last. Throughout the early part of the 20th century, the hub and rail network declined, as technical difficulties persisted and neighbouring countries protested a potential expansion to the network.

The final death knell for the hub came in the 1940s when Bolivia's mining industry completely collapsed. The decimation of the industry hit Uyuni hard and its many trains were abandoned, where they remain to this day. 

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While the majority of the rolling stock in the Kraków graveyard is made up of EU07 electric trains, the boneyard also stores plenty of older locomotives, which date back decades, as well as several more modern trains. 

Unlike many vehicle scrapyards in more urban locations, the trains that languish in Kraków's sprawling locomotive graveyard don't appear to have suffered too much vandalism.

The relative lack of vandalism (some of the trains have been sprayed with graffiti) is all the more surprising given the graveyard appears to be severely neglected. Nature has been left to take its course and overgrown greenery surrounds the out-of-service trains.

A lucrative enterprise, Lewis charges adult visitors £24 ($30) to enter the scrapyard. But if they wish to take photographs of the yard's thousands of Instagram-friendly used cars, the entry fee rises slightly.

It's not hard to figure out why Old Car City is such a magnet for both amateur and professional photographers. The scrapyard is jam-packed with auto gems, some of which have been parked for so long, they have trees and shrubs growing through them. 

Georgia's Old Car City may no longer sell spare parts, but this gigantic scrapyard in the sun-kissed Arizona desert is a flourishing business. Set up in 1993, Desert Valley Auto Parts near Phoenix sprawls over 40 acres, and could very well be the largest classic car junkyard on Earth.

The scrapyard stores thousands of old cars dating from as far back as the 1940s and is America's go-to yard for vintage car aficionados looking for elusive spare parts to use in their classic vehicles.

Desert Valley Auto Parts has such an enormous inventory, staff still haven't got around to sorting hundreds of old cars that have lived on the site for years. They may never get the chance to catalogue the yard's entire collection, which is constantly growing.

Classic car enthusiasts who can't make it to the yard in person can shop for spare parts on the DVAP website. Although many of the vehicles are yet to be documented, staff put the most sought-after components online.

The scrapyard is so renowned, it has even starred in its very own Discovery Channel reality show. Desert Car Kings, which ran on the channel for one season in 2011, followed the yard's employees as they went about their day-to-day business.

Then the heavy work begins. The wrecking workers gradually break down the cruise liners, effectively deconstructing the vessels down to their skeletons.

All in all, more than 95% of a ship can be repurposed meaning very little of the vessels end up in landfill.

However, the process isn't entirely environmentally friendly. Not by a long shot. Despite efforts in recent years to raise standards, the beach at Alang is severely polluted with all sorts of toxic nasties including asbestos, circuit boards and fuel that has leaked from the decommissioned ships.

The second most important breaking yard for scrapped cruise liners is located in the Turkish port of Aliağa in Izmir Province. The yard is the final resting place of a number of iconic vessels that have been retired, such as Carnival's Fantasy and Inspiration (pictured) liners.

The global pause in cruising during COVID-19 accelerated the retirement and scrapping of many older and expensive-to-run ships. Although ships can take up to a year to dismantle, each vessel can fetch up to £3.4 billion ($4bn) in recycled material profits, so once-beloved ships line up at the docks to await their final fate.  

In July 2020, Carnival Cruise Line announced that four Fantasy Class vessels were to exit the fleet. While some were sold as floating hotels, others including Carnival Imagination (right) were sent to Aliağa Ship Breaking Yard. Carnival Imagination is captured here next to the exposed hulk of its sister ship Carnival Fantasy, built in 1990.

Ship-breaking can be environmentally damaging, but scientists and engineers are constantly working to find less destructive methods. These can include improving conditions for workers, breaking down ships away from the beach and isolating parts of the ship which could pose a danger to the environment.

Aliağa's ship-breakers also hold the badge for breaking down the world's first mega-cruise ship, the Sovereign of the Seas, which was formerly owned by Royal Caribbean. Its most recent owner, the Spanish operator Pullmantur Cruises, filed for bankruptcy in June 2020 due to COVID-19.

As a result of the pandemic, Pullmantur Cruises was also forced to decommission two other major vessels, the MV Horizon and MS Monarch (pictured). Mirroring the activity at the Alang Ship Breaking Yard, Aliağa's wreckers first salvage the ships' contents then dismantle the vessels, retaining the steel and metal scraps.

These metal parts are recycled on site or sent to a smelter or furnace to be melted, then ultimately re-used. In addition to the huge breaking yards at Alang and Aliağa, cruise ships are broken down at scrapyards in Bangladesh, China, Pakistan and other locations around the world.

Nestled in a quiet forest near the small village of Châtillon in southern Belgium, this eerie place was once the final resting spot of over 500 classic cars. The story behind these rusty, abandoned yet oddly beautiful vehicles is a fascinating one.

During World War II, over 600,000 US soldiers fought in Belgium. The cars of Chatillon once belonged to some of the American troops stationed in the country at that time.

When the fighting came to an end, the soldiers returned home to the United States while the stylish automobiles they'd acquired were left behind and eventually consumed by nature. With the cost of having them all shipped back too expensive for the military to consider at the time, ranking officers had the vehicles driven up a hill, nicely parked and hidden from the world.

Once back on American soil, the troops who wanted to retrieve their car would have had to fork out for the transportation costs involved – none did.

In the mid-1950s, it's thought Canadian troops stationed at nearby bases left more vehicles in the forest. So many cars were abandoned here that, at one time, the town of Châtillon actually had four car graveyards.

Over the decades, a 1953 Pontiac Chieftain, a Renault Dauphine, a Studebaker Champion and a Ford Thunderbird were all found concealed amongst the mud and shrubbery.

Once a magnet for urban explorers and collectors, who flocked to take parts for salvage and souvenirs, the 'traffic jam forest' lives on today only in photographs and memories. Following a court order citing environmental reasons, the last of the graveyards here were cleared in 2010.

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