European holiday - Cars and trains in Mulhouse

(From 2011)

Whether it is by coincidence or by intention both France's national motor museum and national car museum happen to be a few miles apart in northern Mulhouse. The rail museum began as a dumping ground for old SNCF bits and pieces but the car museum began as a private collection owned by the Schlumpf brothers, a pair of woollen mill owners, before being unofficially commandeered by the striking factory workers union in 1977 when the business fell into terminal financial problems. The brothers ran off to Switzerland and the workers opened the collection warehouse to the public. Eventually the proper authorities got involved, the government took over the cars to recoup the Schlumpf's debts and the whole caboodle was turned into a national car museum.

The car museum has been renovated in recent years but the exhibits are mostly pre-1970s cars, and of them over half are pre-WW2. In fact on entering the exhibition hall the first row of thirty cars stretching out ahead barely even entered the 20th century. One seriously comprehensive collection in other words; Panhards, Peugeots, Renaults, De Dion Boutons, Benzs, Rolls Royces, and many others of which even I had not heard of. The most represented marque was Bugatti, an obvious choice since they were made in Molsheim, a town not too far away, and the pride of place in the darkened side gallery was given over to one of the museum's two Bugatti Royales. The Royale is a mountain of car, about the same length as a large pickup truck (21 feet), with twelve litre aeroplane engine, 24-inch wheels, and right hand drive (like all Bugattis). Thanks to the Great Depression they only made six of them before giving up the project and returning to slightly more sane cars. Because cars of the time were still coachbuilt none of the cars were quite the same, despite the similar chassis underneath. My favourites were the specially designed 1936 Type 57 coupe without any windscreen pillars, a concept far ahead of it's time; and the two-tone cars painted glossy black with either yellow or red flanks, a neat touch to already very handsome cars.

Only ten minutes drive away across the northern suburbs of Mulhouse was the rainbow painted train shed of the rail museum. After the massed ranks of tidily parked vintage cars in the Schlumpf collection the train museum presented a more eclectic selection of sights and sounds. Most curious was the strident French voices playing from mannequins in some of the coaches. These mannequins were on the shoddy side, looking like something that should be on top of a bonfire, but they did have on authentic period clothings, thus giving a fair idea of what French commuters and day-trippers looked like in 1890 or whenever. The 1890 commuters must've looked a bit grimy since they were sat on the top deck of the train- not so bad one might think but the top deck was open to the elements.

The museum had also come up with the interesting idea of fitting some kind of steam canister in some of their engines so every so often they would literally blow off steam. In fact the place was a font of imaginative thinking; to show what the French resistance got up to during WW2 one engine had been tipped onto it's side as if it had been hit by resistance sabotage (or Improvised Explosive Device as we call bombs these days). This had the side effect of showing what the underside of a steam engine looks like.

The newer part of the museum was in a very dark shed with efficient air conditioning. We only noticed how efficient the air con was when we opened the door to the older shed and felt the heat. The older part was an interesting wooded-roofed shed (resembling Manchester Oxford Road and possibly of a similar vintage) and contained most of the museum's collection. Coming from the perspective of the British; who are only ever told about the Stephenson's Rocket, The Flying Scotsman and Mallard and grow up assuming that these represent the three pinnacles of train development, it is easy to overlook how much the French have to boast about. True, they weren't first with the train (and the earliest locomotives in the museum are all British-made) but they seemed to become pre-eminent in the field about the time we seemed to give up in the 1950s.

To illustrate the point no fewer than two electric engines were mounted with a plaque claiming they had set 'Record Du Monde Vitesse' of 331 KPH in 1953. Obviously being English I had been taught all about Mallard's record run in 1938 and then never received a mention of anything that happened after so I was ignorant of the precise details. Perhaps, I thought, the two engines had been coupled together on their record run. Turns out that SNCF deliberately ran both on consecutive days just to show off. They still hold the record now, as a little booth showed a film of a TGV flying to 500kph. My favourite trains were the Bugatti Railcar, which like the firm's car was heroically fast and glamourous at the time, but disappeared without a trace after the war; and the two TEE's (Trans Europe Expresses). Not only did they look impossibly chic in their silver livery and aura of seventies retro-cool, but their sleeping cars looked like genuinely nice places to be (if a bit old fashioned these days). I stood for a minute and more peering into the windows trying to work out exactly how the compartments were arranged. It looked like they had been ingeniously designed to split the compartment in half with the top bunk being a separate room from the bottom bunk. It looked better than the modern day aeroplane seat anyway.