Hello and bonjour!
It is March 2022,
it is a beautiful spring day,
and this is a Paris sightseeing bus.
And this is another Paris sightseeing bus.
And if you look closely at these images,
you might notice what is different and special about Paris sightseeing buses
compared to sightseeing buses anywhere else on the planet.
And that is…
absolutely nothing.
They look exactly the same as tourist buses do everywhere,
and frankly if it wasn’t for the word “Paris” written on the side,
we could easily be in London,
Hong Kong,
New York,
or Basingstoke.
But it wasn’t always like that.
If you came to Paris in the 60s or 70s,
you might have seen what I think is the greatest bus ever built.
It all starts in 1956,
when a brand new company launches onto the Paris tourism scene,
called Cityrama.
To try and beat the existing competition,
they want their sightseeing buses to be so special and so futuristic
that no-one would ever want to ride on a normal sightseeing bus ever again.
So they went out and bought…
a Citroen 55 truck.
Erm.
Ok, not the best start,
but wait until you see what they did with it.
First, they removed the body,
and then sent the chassis to a local coachmaker called Currus
to rebuild it as a bus.
And they gave them three demands:
it should be a double decker bus,
it should have as much glass as possible,
and it should look like nothing else on earth.
And here’s what they got back.
This is the 1956 Cityrama Currus Citroen 55,
or for our French viewers,
le Currus Citroen 55 Cityrama.
And just to clarify, for any of you looking at it for the first time,
and trying to understand what your eyes are telling you,
this was real.
It featured a double deck of domed glass
(well, one and a half decks);
a shiny silver boat-shaped body
that makes it look almost like an amphibious vehicle,
which for the record it definitely wasn’t;
a bright red flash down the side that becomes a sort of giant handle at the back,
presumably to make it easier for passing Godzillas to pick
the whole thing up and throw it into the Seine;
and to top it all off,
there was a shark fin spike pointing out of the windscreen
for no reason at all.
Transport history superstar Tim Dunn calls them “the world’s most bonkers bus”
and frankly it’s hard for me to disagree.
They were nothing short of magnificent.
And if that’s what we think about them now,
imagine what they must have looked like to the average Parisian in 1956.
[Jean Paul] "So as I was saying Simone, hell is other peop…
what the blimmin eck is that?"
[Simone] "I’ve no idea, Jean Paul..."
To be fair, among all the crazy parts of the design,
there were some genuine innovations;
this was one of the first sightseeing buses
that provided individual audio commentary to each seat,
with headphones giving passengers a choice of 7 or 8 different languages.
But it was their space-age looks that really made them stand out.
The Cityramas quickly became an iconic sight on the streets of the capital,
proving popular not only with tourists,
but also, quite helpfully, with film directors.
They were given a string of starring cameos in French cinema,
perhaps most famously in 1960’s Zazie Dans Le Métro.
The bus was more than just a publicity stunt for Cityrama,
but if it had been a publicity stunt,
it couldn’t have gone much better.
In just a couple of years, the bonkers bus had turned the newcomers
into one of the best-known sightseeing companies in Paris,
which just goes to show,
any method is good as long as it works.
[Jean-Paul] Oh, that’s a good one, I’ll have that!
There was however one small problem with the all-glass design,
(and some of you might be there already):
turns out it was a bit prone to overheating.
The vehicles were basically a greenhouse on wheels,
so they were built with a large grille on the front to try cool the engine;
but that turned out not to be enough,
so Currus added a second grille.
That also turned out not to be enough so they added a third.
And a fourth.
And one of the buses still managed to burn itself out on the Rue de Rivoli.
As far as I know everyone got out safely from this incident,
but Cityrama quickly realised that toasting tourists
was likely to have a negative impact on their brand image.
And after only four years,
they already started to replace the vehicles with a slightly more sensible design,
and by 1973, they’d clearly just given up and gone with the safe option.
I mean, that’s a really boring bus!
But despite all of that,
the original Citroen 55s still ran alongside the newer buses for nearly 30 years.
Eventually though, time did catch up with them,
(and possibly safety standards)
and the last bus was finally retired in the early 1980s.
Which kind of raises the question: what happened to them after that?
Well it’s a bit of a mystery.
There’s not a lot of information out there,
– at least, not that I’ve been able to find with my Google research.
Only a handful of vehicles were ever built
– something between 3 and 10 of them in total –
and unfortunately it’s possible that none of them survive.
But we do know that one of them ran away to join a circus for a few years,
and another was around until at least 2008;
there are some photos on Flickr showing a rather sorry-looking Cityrama bus,
awaiting restoration in a secret location somewhere near Paris.
That’s as far as I’ve got at the moment,
but I am trying to track one down,
and this is where potentially you might be able to help.
It’s a long shot but if anyone watching this has any news about a surviving bus,
please do let us know in the comments,
or send me a message on Twitter, Facebook, whatever suits you.
Maybe that one in the Flickr photos has been repaired by now?
Or maybe it’s still sitting there awaiting funds for restoration?
I would love it if this video was only part one of the story.
And on that dramatic cliffhanger,
thank you to everyone who helped making this video,
thank you all for watching,
and I will see you soon.