The French Collection

[Ali Smith]

Bore 125mm, stroke 130mm, two inlet valves and one exhaust valve, single overhead camshaft.
In the '80s Honda came up with a four-valve single (XBR500) with radial valves operated by multiple rockers. They called this arrangement RFVC, standing for Radial Four Valve Combustionchamber. It could equally stand for Rudge Four Valve Copy.

[Hiawatha]

Just above the right-hand smoke deflector you can see can see some shields attached to a pillar. These consist of the coat of arms of a town with its name above and what appears to be a locomotive number below. I assume these are nameplates of a class of engines named after French towns.

There were several classes that wore such town crests – some engines of the CC-6500, BB-15000, BB-22200, CC-40100 and CC-72000 classes did but there may be more. The numbers shown below are additions from the museum and were not there on the locomotives.


© Wolfgang Koenigsfeld, from bahnbilder.de

The left one is from the BB-22311 (can't read the name: starting with "Pierre..." maybe?) and the next one is "Chambly" from the BB-15032.


© Finn Møller, from finnmoller.dk

The right one is "Vaucresson" but I haven't found the matching engine for that town. Maybe there are books listing the engines with their names but this info is not found on the 'net. Looks to me like XXXX 6506 but the text left of it is too long for CC?

[Ali Smith]

Thanks @Hiawatha. I embiggened my original photo and found that the left-hand shield is for 'Pierrefitte'. The one on the right is as you say Vaucresson, number 76505-6506.

Cheers, Ali

[Hiawatha]

It's actually Z 6505–6506, an EMU. I thought it was from the CC-6506 as I didn't know that even commuter EMUs carried these crests.


© Bernd Kittendorf, from bkcw-bahnbilder.de

[Ali Smith]

On checking the weather forecast the next day, it seemed that this would be the best day of the week so we decided to spend it in the town centre rather than another enormous museum. First port of call was the Place de la Réunion, so named to commemorate Mulhouse becoming part of France in 1798.
One of the most striking buildings is the Temple Saint-Etienne (Church of St. Stephen). It dates from the 19th century but there has been a church on the site since the 12th century. It is a Calvinist church, and there is also a Catholic St. Stephen's church in town so presumably it is called a temple to avoid confusion.



Nearby is the Hôtel de Ville of 1552. The tricolore flying from this building is the same one in the corner of the previous picture.



This is no longer the town hall. The council chamber is still used for council meetings but can also be hired for weddings. Neither was happening at the time of our visit, so we were able to go in and enjoy its 16th Century ambience. The rest of the building is a museum. Mostly it is about the history of the area going back to the middle ages if not earlier. There is a section concerning the Dreyfus Affair (Alfred Dreyfus was a local man). In addition to the things in the museum, there is quite a good view from the front windows.



Part way through our visit I started to suspect that the building had the TARDIS-like property of being larger on the inside than the outside. It was only later I realised we had crossed this bridge into the building behind.



Nearby is the Post Office, where we found this post box with the Mulhouse arms on the pedestal.



Here are two more views of buildings on Place de la Réunion,





And another, this time showing the Tour de l'Europe:



This was built between 1969 and 1972; architect Fran?ois Spoery. It is mostly residential with a historically revolving restaurant on the top. Although you get a good view of it from here, it's actually located at Porte Jeune.

Having done with the Place de la Réunion for the time being, we made our way to the Musée des Beaux-Arts (Museum of Fine Arts). The time was approaching midday, which is when they close for lunch, so we went for a crèpe.

On returning to the museum, we found a couple of odd works in the garden. Do you remember the woolly motorcycle in the Tourist Office? Not content with that, the same bunch of crackpots also make socks for trees:



The other oddity was in bronze, so perhaps meant to be taken more seriously.



It was created by one Naji Kamouche in 2014 and is entitled "Mes Pas à Faire", which I take to mean "My Not to Do" but I am happy to be contradicted. Rob wondered if there were a pair of bronze y-fronts inside the jeans, but there weren't.

Inside the exhibits were mostly paintings. I don't recall much about them, but I do remember there was a Breughel.

After that we returned to the Place de la Réunion to visit the Musée de Patrmoine (heritage museum), tucked away behind Temple de Saint-Etienne. I remember even less about this; it was mostly photographs and maps. I do remember a picture of Alfred de Glehn's house, an upper-middle class villa.
After that it was time to explore a restaurant and some bars.

Another enormous museum next time.

Have fun,

Ali

[joe cassidy]

Thanks for the photos Ali.

"Mes pas à faire" could also mean "my next steps", or "steps I need to take".

Do you have any photos of the railway station ?

[Newportnobby]

Some great architecture there, and the bronze bloke is half the man he used to be.

[Bealman]

That sock on the tree is better than mine - all mine have holes in the toe

[Ali Smith]

Firstly, thanks to @joe cassidy for your suggested translations. They fit the work better than mine. I'm afraid I don't have any photos of the station.

The day after our exploration of the town centre we caught a No. 1 tram for the short ride to Arrêt Musée de l'Auto. Unsurprisingly, we had come to visit this:



Sorry about the finger.

It's a car museum housed in a former textile works. So far so unremarkable, but its size, focus and history make it unique.
 
Musée National de l'Automobile, Collection Schlumpf is an automobile museum built around the Schlumpf Collection of classic automobiles. It has the largest displayed collection of automobiles and contains the largest and most comprehensive collection of Bugatti motor vehicles in the world.

Brothers Hans and Fritz Schlumpf were Swiss citizens born in Italy, but after their mother Jeanne was widowed, she moved the family to her home town of Mulhouse.

In 1935 the brothers founded a limited company which focused on producing spun woollen products. By 1940, at the time of the German invasion of France, 34-year-old Fritz was the chairman of a spinning mill in Malmerspach. After World War II, the two brothers devoted their time to growing their business, and became wealthy.

Fritz loved cars, driven by an abiding love for beautiful automotive engineering. Having wanted a Bugatti since childhood, he bought a Type 35B just before the German invasion of France.



I'm not sure if this is that actual car, but it is a Type 35 and the fact that it is displayed in isolation suggests it might be.

After the war Fritz began racing classic cars, but was requested by the textile union to "abstain from this competition which could endanger your life and deprive us of our esteemed director." Fritz had been generous to his workers, providing employee trips, installing an employee theatre and driving expectant mothers to the hospital in his own car. This was in great contrast to brother Hans, a former banker, who was extremely stingy towards his employees.
With the arrival of modern postwar designs in the 1950s, pre-war cars became affordably available. Fritz and Hans began collecting in earnest in the early 1950s, developing a reputation in the trade for only buying the most desirable models. Assisted by Mr Raffaelli, a Renault dealer from Marseille and the owner of several Bugattis, they built a Bugatti collection obsessively and quickly:
During the summer of 1960, they acquired ten Bugattis, as well three Rolls-Royces, two Hispano-Suizas and one Tatra. By the end of the summer, they had purchased 40 cars.
Gordini sold them ten old racing cars in one sale.
Ferrari sold a racing single seater.
Mercedes-Benz sold spare cars from its collection.
Racing driver Jo Siffert sold three Lotus racing cars.

Bugatti remained the brothers' focus. Fritz sent a form letter to all owners on the Bugatti club register, offering to buy all of their cars. In 1962 he bought nearly 50 Bugattis. In the spring of 1963, he acquired 18 of Ettore Bugatti's personal cars, including the Bugatti Royale Coupé Napoléon. In 1963 automobile collector John Shakespeare of Centralia, Illinois offered his 30 Bugattis, the largest collection in the United States. Fritz bought all of them, making headlines in the United States. By 1967 the brothers owned 105 examples of the marque.
Over the years nearly 400 items (vehicles, chassis and engines) were acquired, and from 1964 as the woollen industry declined, a wing of the former 200,000 sq ft Mulhouse spinning mill was chosen to quietly restore and house the collection.

A team of up to 40 craftsmen was assembled under a confidentiality agreement to carry out the restoration work. While many around the world knew of the collection, its scale still surprised the unfamiliar.

Fritz visited Mulhouse daily, choosing the colours and type of restoration each car would receive. The workers removed the mill's interior walls and laid a red tile walkway with gravel floors for the cars to rest upon. Seeking to avoid competing against themselves, the brothers remained very secretive about their collection, only rarely showing it to a favoured few.

In light of the unrelenting global shift of textile manufacturing to Asia, by 1976 the Schlumpf brothers began selling their factories. In October the Malmerspach plant laid off employees, and a strike broke out, with 400 police holding back the workers from ransacking the Mulhouse plant. After a stand-off, on March 7, 1977, textile union activists staged a sit-in strike at Schlumpf offices, and broke into the Mulhouse "factory" to find the astounding collection of cars. An unrestored Austin 7 was burned and the workers' union representative remarked "There are 600 more where this one came from."
The Schlumpfs fled to their native Switzerland, and spent the rest of their days as permanent residents of the Drei Koenige Hotel in Basel. But with wages and tax evasion accusations outstanding, the factory was occupied for the next two years by the textile union and renamed "Workers' Factory". To recoup some lost wages, the union opened the museum to the public, with some 800,000 people viewing the collection in two years.
As the scale of the brothers Schlumpf debt rose, various creditors, including the French government and unions, eyed the car collection toward recovering their losses. To save the collection from destruction, break-up or export, the contents were classified in 1978 as a French Historic Monument by Council of State. In 1979, a bankruptcy liquidator ordered the building closed.

In 1981 the collection, buildings and residual land were sold to the National Automobile Museum Association (NAMAoM), a state sanctioned public/private conglomerate that includes: the City of Mulhouse, the Regional Board of the Alsace Region, the organizers of the Paris Auto Show and the Automobile Club de France.
The NAMAoM placed daily management of the museum in the hands of an operating company, the National Automobile Museum of Mulhouse Management Association, which opened the museum to the public in 1982. However, lacking the enthusiasm of the Schlumpfs or the financial drive of the union, the collection gradually fell into decline.
In 1999 NAMAoM contracted Culturespaces to take over and modernise the museum and its operations. Culturespaces renovated the museum, including creating large scale public spaces for other cultural events, while conserving the well-known main hall. Widening the relevance of the museum to a younger audience by being given control of the French national automobile collection, the museum reopened in March 2000 as the largest automobile museum in the world.

In 1981, Fritz Schlumpf filed a lawsuit from Switzerland claiming he was entitled to a portion of the proceeds of the sale to NAMAoM. He died in 1992, but in 1999 a French court found in his favour, and directed that the French Government pay the balance of a 40 million franc indemnity to Schlumpf's widow Madame Arlette Schlumpf-Naas in Switzerland. The court also instructed return of the ownership of the 62 cars in the so-called "Malmerspach collection" (the reserve stock), including 17 Bugattis.
Having moved the cars to a shed in Wettolsheim on the outskirts of Colmar, Madame Schlumpf-Naas drew up a sales agreement with two businessmen, selling them ownership of the cars but retaining them in her storage shed until after her death. Upon her death in 2008, many of the cars were sold to the Mullin Automotive Museum in California.
 
The museum is now listed as a National Heritage site by the French Government and is still dedicated to the Schlumpf brothers' mother.

The collection includes over 520 vehicles, with 400 on display.
 On entering the first hall, one is confronted by this remarkable sight:



On the left are Bugattis as far as the eye can see. On the right are lesser cars, such as Rolls-Royce and Mercedes-Benz.



Of these I was particularly taken with this Merc.



On to the main hall, which is even larger but has mirrors to make it seem bigger still.



Very early cars are in the foreground, but there are cars of all eras in here.
One fairly humble car that caught my eye was this Renault 4 that has been cut down, presumably to make it more convenient around town. It put me in mind of @maridunian's shrunken Canadian trains. Alongside it is a Trabant.



You may have noticed the rather snazzy lamps which illuminate the halls and also provide the useful service of holding the roof up. These are replicas of those on the Alexander III bridge in Paris.
Other parts of the collection were a collection of childrens' cars, a hall full of racing cars and a temporary exhibition of cars from the TinTin stories.
I'm afraid I didn't take many pictures of the exhibits. There were so many it was almost bewildering.
 
Wikipedia provides a list of all the marques in the collection alongside the number of each. There are 123 Bugattis, but only three Fords and a single Volkswagen. Of the best known French makes, there are 18 examples of Renault and Citröen score just ten. There is, however, a Violet-Bogey: something few can lay claim to.
We made our way back into town by tram. Here's one that went the other way whilst we were waiting.



In the Place de la Réunion we found an outdoor bar where we ordered wheat beer and were served one of these each:



You will note that the lady is wearing the traditional dress of Alsace. I mean the headgear, I've no idea if the lack of nether garments is also traditional. The writing in red had me confused. I know the word 'culotte', meaning 'breeches' or 'knickers', but here it seems to have been turned into the past participle of a verb. Fortunately Apple Translate came to the rescue and it actually means "some very cheeky beers" which seems appropriate. The beer was very pleasant, but in due course it was 'bottoms up' and we went in search of dinner then returned to our hotel for a nightcap.

[Newportnobby]

Wow! Fabulous museum
Mind you, I reckon I'd need a wheelchair to get round it all

[Ali Smith]

Yes, we had to have a sit down part way round.

[Ali Smith]

The following day was our last full day in Mulhouse. We wanted to visit the motorcycle museum in Bantzenheim (around 20km away at a guess). You can get there by train or 'bus but neither was convenient. The railway station is about a mile from the museum, but Rob has trouble with an old ankle injury so this is too far to walk comfortably. The 'bus takes you much closer, but the service is infrequent and there is little to do between the museum closing and the 'bus arriving, so regretfully we adopted Plan B, which was to visit Electropolis. This is at the same tram stop as the railway museum, so getting there was not difficult.
I was going to say Electropolis is a museum showing the history of electricity, but electricity has always been the same. What has changed is our understanding and exploitation of it and that is what the establishment is about. It is run by EDF and as you would expect from a large corporation like that it is well done. We quite enjoyed it, but neither of us are interested in electricity in the same way as we are in railways or motor vehicles.
I didn't take any pictures of electricity, but when we got back to the tram stop we saw this:



It's called a draisine and is a sort of superior Wickham trolley. You can't see it in the photograph, but there is a folding crane at the back like the ones on builders' merchants' lorries. This one belongs to the railway museum.
Having returned to town we wandered around for a while. It was noticeable how many trompe l'oeil paintings there were on buildings.
 








This one has a portrait of Alfred Dreyfus in the top left window, and a 'quotation' from Delacroix' "Liberty Leading the People" on the bottom right.
In due course we had a few drinks and dinner and returned to our hotel  to prepare for our return to Paris.

[Train Waiting]

A reproduction of a poster in the November 1972 Railway Magazine, Vol. 118 No. 859. The original was in colour but the Railway Magazine then only had colour on the front cover. Sometimes there was a separate loose colour picturingham inside.

Still, it was only 20 New Pence. The Bank of England states that's £2.38 in to-day's money.

With all good wishes.

John

[Ali Smith]

Having checked out of the hotel, we made our way to Porte Jeune and caught a tram to the Central Station. It was a while before our train was due, so I bought a copy of Loco Revue to try to read. It featured a layout that I had seen at a couple of exhibitions in England.
 In due course we made our way to the appropriate platform and watched our train come in.



We clambered aboard, found seats and the train departed for Strasbourg. The weather was brighter than when we had travelled down, but the windows were still dirty. We arrived at Strasbourg on time and having some time to wait for the Paris train we went in search of a snack. We found a shop within the station where we bought sandwiches and had a look around.
The station was built in the period when Alsace was within the German Empire and is quite a grand building. When it was found necessary to enlarge the station, rather than build some ugly extension or demolish the whole thing as no doubt British Rail would have done, a glass dome was built over the forecourt, like this:



Or from across the road:



You can see more about this in episode 7 of 'The Architecture the Railways Built', currently on BBC iPlayer.
The dome (not sure that's the right word) and the original station were both impressive; the sandwiches not so much.
We made our way back to the appropriate platform to await our train, where we saw this TGV:



Shortly afterwards our ICE drew into the station.



We found our reserved seats, stowed our luggage and were soon on our way. I noted that the windows were dirty on this train, too. Despite travelling at speeds nudging 200mph, at one point I was briefly overtaken by sleep. In less than an hour and a half we were in Paris, a journey that used to take eight hours on the Orient Express.
We left the Gare de l'Est and returned to the Hôtel Whistler where we were to stay for two nights. Having checked in and unpacked, we went to Gare du Nord to buy Navigo cards and put some 'bus credits on them. Having done that, we went in search of food and drink, and dined at the same place we had previously.

[grumbeast]

A wonderful nostalgic thread for me thankyou!!

I spent a wonderful week in Alsace last summer and of course spent a day at the museum in Mulhouse, I thought it a fantastic museum, we only spent some time at the museum as we were with friends who had driven us all the way there from just outside Paris where they live.  My wife and I then hired a car and spent the week wandering around medieval sites and driving around the Vosges.

One thing that surprised me was no picture of the most beautiful French locomotive, the U1 La Divine .. Seeing this beauty was one of my dreams so I was like a little kid when I saw her.  So here's a pic of her just to add.

I didn't have time for the auto museum (my friend there is a medieval scholar, so its a little too modern, but he loves trains too!) but it looked amazing.


SO once again, thanks for the amazing posts and great commentary

Graham