Hello and bonjour!
It’s 17th July 2021
and because it’s reopening today for the first time in I think nearly a year
I thought we’d go on a little trip to the Paris Transport Museum.
Which may come as a surprise to any Parisians watching this video
because there is no Paris Transport Museum.
Or at least
there’s no transport museum in Paris.
But in a piece of outrageous pedantry,
(even for this channel)
I’ve discovered there *is* a museum of Paris Transport,
(so technically, a Paris Transport Museum)
it’s just not in Paris.
And that’s why we’ve come here to Chelles-Gournay,
half an hour outside the capital,
to see the Paris transport museum that hardly anyone in Paris knows about.
So this is Chelles-Gournay station, on the very eastern edge of the Paris suburbs,
right out at the far end of Line E.
Yep, like I said, the museum is absolutely not in the centre of Paris.
In fact it’s not even in the centre of Chelles.
From here it’s still a 25 minute walk or a 15 minute bus ride before you get there.
Normally I’d walk that,
but I’ve just seen what the bus looks like,
and OBVIOUSLY we’re going to catch the bus.
The route is run by museum volunteers on days when the museum is open
and it is a free shuttle service,
you don’t need a ticket,
you just hop straight on.
So I guess you could catch it without even going to the museum,
but it doesn’t go anywhere else,
and would be a bit rude not to.
Anyway if you like vintage buses,
just wait until you see what’s inside!
This is the Museum of Urban Transport,
also known as the MTU,
although confusingly the organisation that runs it call themselves
the Association of the Museum of Urban, Interurban and Rural Transport.
And they also call themselves amtuir,
because in France you’re never more than 5 metres from an acronym.
But whatever you call it,
this is possibly the greatest collection of French municipal buses anywhere on planet earth.
There are something like 70 vehicles on display here,
taking you from the horse-drawn omnibuses of the 1800s
through every decade of transport
right up to this 2005 bus
which for personal reasons might just be my favourite one of the lot.
But one of the most interesting exhibits is this bus from World War II.
During the occupation of France petrol became so scarce
that they started converting buses to run on gas.
(And for American viewers, that's a confusing sentence, but I mean actual gas).
That thing on top of the roof is a huge gas tank,
and there’s an inflatable bag inside
that would be filled with uncompressed flammable gas
that provided an alternative fuel for the vehicle.
These buses had quite a strict no-smoking policy.
But it’s not just buses here,
there’s also a lovely selection of trams from all over the country,
including this vintage steam tram
which looks like the French cousin of Toby from Thomas The Tank Engine.
And there’s even some vehicles from outside France.
This surprisingly accurate sculpture of a banana
is actually a 1970s tram from The Hague, in the Netherlands.
Quite what it’s doing a museum of French urban transport is not really explained,
but it was built in Belgium
so erm…
no that doesn’t explain it either.
Right, we’ve had buses, we’ve had trams,
but let's face it, it wouldn’t be a Paris transport museum without a metro.
This one is from 1927
and it is the legendary Sprague-Thomson design,
which served the capital for over half a century.
They were the first Paris metro trains made completely out of metal
after it was discovered that making underground trains out of wood was a bad idea.
Right I’m in 100 year old metro train,
I think it’s more than a hundred years old,
(whispers) and they’ve left the cab door open!
I mean… how hard can it be to drive one of these things, right?
Do you think they’d notice if this went missing?
It turns out they definitely would notice
because this is the only metro they’ve got here.
Which feels slightly underwhelming for a Museum of Urban Transport.
Where are all the other ones?
Well I did some Googling
and I found that the RATP,
the company that runs the metro,
has its own separate collection of historic metros
which they keep in an old railway shed
in the southern suburb of Villeneuve-Saint-Georges.
So I guess that’s where they all are.
And unfortunately: it’s not open to the public!
They only ever let people in there on special occasions
and as you’d imagine you can’t just rock up,
you have to book in advance.
So it might just be me,
but I’m honestly beginning to wonder what Paris has against transport museums.
With the honourable exception of the excellent air and space museum at Le Bourget,
there’s no major car museum,
there’s no major railway museum,
and even the MTU here only opens one day a month
and they’ve got another 60 historic vehicles stuck in storage
because there’s not enough space for them here.
I’m not saying Paris should have all of those museums,
it’s good to spread them around the country,
but there’s enough heritage just lying around
for a world class, 7 day a week, Paris transport museum.
And yet most of the time it’s shut away where no-one can see it.
It just feels like it could be so much more.
The guys at amtuir, the organisation that runs the MTU,
are very much aware of this.
On their website they describe their own museum as
“only a glimpse of what it could be”.
The volunteers here are doing a fantastic job with what they have
but they would love to get more investment,
to be able to open more frequently,
to restore and display more of their collection,
and hopefully one day
to move into a permanent and purpose-built museum
instead of this temporary site they’ve been living in since 2008.
So there we go,
that’s pretty much the story of why Paris has no Transport Museum,
from the Paris Transport Museum.
If you ever get the chance to come out to Chelles and see the collection here,
do it, it’s great!
And it should be way bigger than it is.
And finally
if anyone from the MTU is watching this
and there’s any chance you’d like to invite me to see the private collection...
please do get in touch!
If you’d like to visit the MTU,
it’s a 45-minute journey from central Paris
using Line E to Chelles-Gournay
and then the free vintage shuttle bus,
although for any of you with accessibility issues
it may be better to get the more modern number 113.
The museum itself though is fully accessible
and admission is 5€ for adults, 2€ for kids.
At the moment it’s only open on the third Saturday of each month
but check the website,
there are occasional other open days.
And as always, thank you all for watching
and I will see you soon.