Most of the last 100 years’ rarest road-going vehicles are coachbuilt automobiles, bespoke one-offs, and ridiculously exclusive supercars you’ll almost certainly never see in real life. Unexpected among these rarest vehicles is the Citroën U55 Currus Cityrama, a double-decker bus that easily takes the crown of weirdest bus ever built. I mean, there’s not a single angle of this thing that doesn’t capture your attention. This beauty is the last of its kind and thankfully, an organization is putting it back together. One day, you might be able to join me in a journey through bus history.
Buses are reliable workhorses that don’t get as much credit as they should. Every day, countless examples of these metal tubes operate around the world getting people to work and back home again. Most of the time, the form of the bus closely follows its function, leading to some truly forgettable designs. Can you even picture what one of your local transit buses looks like? Ok, I can, but that’s because I’m solidly a nerd.
It wasn’t always this way. Several decades ago, buses were highly functional but they were also works of art in their own right. There are vintage buses that I’d rather look at over any Ferrari. The iconic GMC New Look fits into that category for me, though that might be my weirdness showing through.
When a bus tour company wanted to stand out in the competitive market of the 1950s, it made the bold move of commissioning custom buses that looked like nothing else on the road. The Citroën U55 Currus Cityrama was the result. It was a hit, but like most buses, it was seen simply as a tool of commerce, not a work of art or embodiment of history worth preserving. Once their service lives were over, the Cityrama buses were unceremoniously discarded. Somehow, just one example survived and is being restored in an ongoing, years-long process by a French historical society.
I first wrote about the bus in 2022 when the bus was still believed to have been lost. Then I wrote about it later that year when the bus was found. Now, we have great news as progress on its restoration is moving along.
This update comes to us from one of my favorite YouTubers, The Tim Traveller. If you don’t know Tim, he’s a charming fellow who explores Europe for some of the weirdest and coolest transportation and culture artifacts. Sometimes his videos document the triumph of a soccer team with a multi-decade losing streak, some sweet French tunnels, or the largest vehicle ever built. His videos are short and are always worth a watch. In a way, Tim’s work reminds me of what YouTube used to be, you know, before the invasion of 30-minute videos where there’s only five minutes of real content.
Anyway, I’m getting beside myself here. Tim recently updated a lovely video detailing everything that’s happened to the weirdest bus in the world since it was found:
Why It’s So Weird
If you have no idea what I’m talking about, I don’t blame you. It’s been nearly three years since we last had an update on the bus and I wouldn’t blame you for forgetting it even existed. Here’s some history from my last entry:
Back in the 1950s, Paris tour company Groupe Cityrama commissioned a fleet of wild buses. There’s little information out there about these buses, but the story is believed to go like this: Groupe Cityrama launched in 1956 as a tourism company in Paris, France. Paris tourism is highly competitive, so the company decided to go far out to get attention. Cityrama’s plan to be different was to have a fleet of distinctive sightseeing buses.
Under the massive glass greenhouses of these buses sat a Citroën Type 55 utility truck chassis. These workhorses featured either 4.6-liter gasoline sixes making 73 HP or 5.2-liter diesel sixes producing 86 HP. The Type 55 launched in 1953 and was produced all of the way to 1965. These trucks acted as platforms for fire engines, flatbeds and…five to ten strange sightseeing buses.
To bus-ify the Type 55, Cityrama took the truck chassis to Currus, a French coachbuilder. There, Currus built the incredible body that you see here on top of the humble Citroën trucks. As Tim originally noted, Currus had the challenge of making a double-decker bus that was both mostly glass and looked like nothing else.
What Currus built was nothing short of extraordinary. Just look at the Cityrama bus and you keep finding new and fascinating things about it. For example, take a look at the rear end and you’ll notice that it has giant tailfins like so many cars of the era. Yes, tailfins on a bus!
Directly above the tailfins is a rounded observation area at the back of the bus and a red character line that starts up front and then terminates at the roof, almost resembling the handle of a basket.
Meanwhile, the front of the bus looks like the bow of a ship, and just above the first deck is a long spear. The rest of the bus is just two decks of metal and glass. Those on the upper deck not only got a better vantage point for sightseeing, but they also sat under a large glass canopy with a removable top.
Inside the Cityrama tour bus, up to 50 tourists could be provided headsets that broadcast commentary in a variety of languages. Now, these features aren’t all that special today when most tour buses are double-decker affairs with open tops, but this was pretty forward-thinking for the late 1950s.
The quirky bus was an instant hit, thrusting Cityrama’s status as the tour operator to go with if you went to Paris. Even when Cityrama picked up Saviem coaches beginning in 1960, the U55s remained highly popular. Everyone loved the U55s so much that they made appearances in French media, including French movie Zazie dans le Métro, where these sort of blurry screenshots originated.
Unfortunately, the unique design of these buses also led to some issues, reportedly. As noted by Tim and other sources, the buses had overheating problems and one even caught fire. Cityrama tried to fix the hot buses with the addition of a second grille, a third grille, and then an oil cooler. But as it turns out, the small and slow Citroën U55 just didn’t take well to being built into a glass monstrosity.
Despite that, Cityrama managed to get over 20 years of use out of the buses, finally retiring them around 1980 or so. It’s now believed that only three buses were ever built. Of those, one was last seen working for a circus before it disappeared. Then there’s this one, which was the last one built in 1959. It was found in a very sorry state in 2022. A private owner saved the bus from the scrapper in the early 2000s, then hid the bus away for two decades before driving it out to a classic car meet in 2022. That’s right, it still ran and drove!
Sadly, this Cityrama bus has been through a lot. When it was found it was missing most of its windows, its body panels were falling off, the paint was a disaster, and the interior was a minefield of jagged edges just looking to cut you up. And yet, there was great news. The dilapidated Citroën bus went into the possession of the Association Normande d’Anciens Utilitaires, which figured the restoration would take four or five years.
Tim says the bus is currently in about 100 different pieces. The engine is sitting pretty in a corner, the steering gear is sitting on a shelf. Normandy Classics completely tore the bus down so every single part could be restored or replaced. In the video, a man named Jimmy explains that Normandy Classics bought a second engine for parts and used what they got from both engines to make one good engine. As Jimmy explains, the goal is to use as many original parts as possible. They’re not in the business of making an entirely new bus, after all.
Thankfully, the Citroën U55 was a common truck, making parts for the platform easier to find. What has been hard was all of the custom bits, so the body, windows, interior, and everything else. All of those parts were shuffled off to a warehouse a few kilometers away where the people of Normandy Classics have been toiling away at rebuilding the bus.
Tim notes that while Normandy Classics mentioned a timeline of four to five years, the restoration couldn’t actually begin until enough funds were raised to start the process. Sadly, this meant that the restoration didn’t even begin until fall 2023, which is why the bus doesn’t look very far along now.
The shop explains that along with gutting the bus and inventorying the parts, it was also sanded down to bare metal. Any metal that can’t be saved due to rust will be cut out, with new pieces welded in. This process is more difficult than it appears, as the owner of Normandy Classics says that the upper deck structure has to come down before they go all Sawzall Hero on the rusted-out pieces of the lower deck.
It’s noted that this sounds simple, but it really isn’t. The shop has to make sure the structure can support all of the weight of people, steel, and glass.
As of now, Normandy Classics has completed rebuilding the drivetrain and restoring the chassis. In addition to restoring the bus, the team hopes to make the bus better than new with modern rustproofing technology and improved engine cooling.
If you’re interested in watching the project’s progress, stop by the “Restoration of the U55 Currus Cityrama” Facebook page. If you want to donate, that page is here. As of publishing, the project has gathered over 91,000 Euros!
Hopefully, four or five years from now, the sole surviving Cityrama tour bus will be back on the road and carrying passengers once again. When that happens it will be a triumph. The bus will be over 70 years old and bringing people smiles once again. You can bet I’ll be there when it happens.
Oh my Lord. I would give them $100 just to drive it for one mile. There’s a money making opportunity for them and charity.
Someone needs to make an RV version..
Somewhere in my attic there are a couple of washed out Kodacolor prints of my parents taking a tour through Paris on a Currus Cityrama bus while attending a conference in 1968. My mother recalls it was pretty warm under all of that glass on the day they toured. Otherwise, she quite enjoyed the experience.
I can see Willy Wonka and co tooling around in one of these!