L'Aventure

By Laurent Gentilhomme

• Photos Dominique Giannelli
• Graphic designer Pascal Budzynski
• Language: French
• Publisher:Editions Alsagraphic
• 61 pages, 300 x 200 mm format, laminated hardcover
• Price: EUR 25
• For ordering: bretzel-garage.com

A Bugatti railcar: speed on rails with elegance

It's often said that Bugatti is the road, the circuit, the track. But Bugatti is also... the rail. Yes, mechanical elegance didn't stop at leather-wrapped steering wheels or shiny exhausts. Between the two world wars, the Molsheim-based firm took a crazy gamble: applying its vision of performance and refinement to a field where robustness and regularity were expected above all else. The result? A railcar. But not just any railcar: a Bugatti railcar, the last vestige of an extraordinary ambition, now carefully preserved at the Cité du Train in Mulhouse.

Aesthetically, it has what you'd expect from a Bugatti creation: pure, taut, almost nautical lines. A sort of steel yacht launched at full speed on rails, with this streamlined front end like a promise of punctuality and momentum. Technically, it's a curiosity that borders on genius: several engines taken directly from the legendary Type 41 Royale, no less. Four blocks to drive this rail car to a speed of 170 km/h, a mild madness for the time – and for the still-emerging SNCF.

This model, both slender and powerful, symbolizes an era when speed was a national ambition and beauty a condition of progress. The Bugatti railcar represents the refinement of a manufacturer who refused to choose between performance and prestige, between efficiency and aesthetics. And if Bugatti's railway dream did not conquer the stations of France as his cars conquered the circuits of the world, we still have this witness of rare audacity, halfway between the racing car and the opera locomotive.

While this railcar is far from rivaling a Type 35 in a straight line, it exudes an elegance that modern trains no longer possess. Still at home in the museum, it nevertheless seems ready to set off again, with its scents of oil, steel, and nostalgia.

Review

An interesting book, and not really expensive at that. The adventure of this last AutoRail is of course the trip to the centre of Molsheim, for the 2023 Bugatti Festival.

What I would have liked to see in such a book is the story about how this particular railcar managed to survive, and the story about it's restoration. That would have been nice, but it's not there...