Citroen H Vans

*Wakes from 9-month slumber*

Wow, my last posting here at "The Die is Cast" was back in September last year. There's no particular reason for the big "sleep", blog-wise, other than I tired of doing my Photoshopped dioramas (hardly anyone was interested in them, anyway) and so that led to me taking a break from posting here.

However, I've still been collecting diecast cars and also getting into model-building for the first time, so I thought it's well overdue that I start posting about my hobby of collecting models once more, as I have quite a bit of activity to share with my tiny readership, and in later postings I'll focus on some planes and ships, in addition to the cars, vans and bikes.

I thought I'd start off with some fun I've been having in recent months, and that's collecting a few Citroen Type H vans, most of them with a "foodie" theme. Most of them are made by Eligor, in 1:43 scale.

Probably my favourite, this beachy snack van is beautifully
detailed, and that awning on the windscreen is a real winner.

Coming in a close second, this ice-cream van is also superb.
One thing I love about these vans is how cheap they are; many
are less than $20US, to my mind a bargain.

This "L'Epicier" (grocer) van has great looking roll-down
canvas sides (no, they don't work) but I love the set of scales
that you can see in this rear-angle shot.

The detailing in this Eligor series is so good. This is the
Pizza Toni van, one that is not so common and sometimes
goes for higher prices in the 30-40 dollar range.

The last of my Eligors is this charming "Orchestra Bus"
complete with musical instrument shaped luggage on top.
The orchestra is the scintillating "Fred & Son".

Not so beautifully done is this Charcuterie van made by Atlas.
At least it maintains the foodie theme perfectly well.

Not certain who makes this one, as it came in a Matchbox
box, but it doesn't have the same livery at the Matchbox item.
Instead, it has (for Australians) the very well known livery of
Sao Biscuits, one of our national icons. It was truly as cheap
as a packet of Saos, and it's welcome here at my place.

Altaya's superb "Route Bleue" series of dioramas includes
this Citroen Type H ice-cream van, complete with little boy
really hanging out for his ice-cream on a summer's day.

And some model-makers chop and modify their Type Hs.
I bought this from a modller called Daniel Lardon, of France.
It wasn't cheap (75 Euro) but I simply had to have this very
nicely made fruit and vegie seller's van, complete with a set
of scales and extremely well made 1:43 scale fruit and veg.

 

Finally, though I love these old hard-working Citroen vans, I had never seen one "in the flesh" until recently. Then, walking back to my car after an evening out at a restaurant in Sydney, there it was, parked in the street and lit up like a Christmas tree. 

It belongs to a florist called 'Madame Limpani' (that's her
neon name in the windshield that my iPhone failed to cope
with). And so now I know, they're every bit as charming in
the flesh as they are in 1:43 scale.

Motoring along the Route Bleue

That small band of regular readers of my little diecast blog will know that I like to create dioramas using Photoshop, but I also like the more traditional 3-D dioramas as well. The sad fact is that I don't really have much skill at building things with my hands, and so I have resorted to buying some pre-made 3D dioramas, all in the fabulous 'Route Bleue' series made by Altaya. I have bought nine of them so far, and as I am rapidly running out of places to put them in my study, I think that's it... well unless I see something just irresistible.

So here's the Route Bleue show and tell.

Citroen Dyane 'Flowers' model, stopping lakeside at Annecy,
looking suspiciously like they are both lost and on holidays.

Citroen Type H van in Roanne selling an ice-cream to a little boy.

It's the people and the setting, as well as the cars, which draw
me to any diorama. I can't resist food vans of any sort....

Mercedes 280SL, with startlet perched on the bonnet, posing
for photos at the Cannes film festival.

Every time I see Mercedes sports car of this vintage I always
think of my sister Helen. It was her dream Lotto-win car and
sadly for her, she never won Lotto and hasn't owned a Merc.

Family of picknickers in a Renault Ondine at Aix-en-Provence.

Bread, butter, cheese, fruit, cakes, Thermos of coffee. Happy days.

Fisherman and his pooch stop in their Citroen Mehari to
dangle the line for a while, at L'Yonne.

 

A beekeeper driving a Morris Minivan stops to tend a hive
by a lavender field at Digne.

My one 'modded' diorama, of a Panhard Dyna stopping off
at Le Meridionale Cafe for refreshments. My 'mod' is that the
Route Bleue original car is a dull grey Dyna, and I thought
my lemon yellow Dyna (by Sunstar) looked a lot better than
the original scene, which was a bit brab and colourless.

 

Nice car, boring diorama! This is a Salmson S4E stopped by
the seaside at La Moyenne Corniche. Viewed side-on, you
can't see any people, as it's two oldies sitting on a bench and
a small kid walking by. The car and the pretty background
photo of the ocean make up for these deficiencies.

Last, definitely not least, my absolute favourite. Protesting
farmers dump a load of melons from their Peugeot 203 Pickup
onto the middle of the road, stopping the traffic.

Lovely attention to detail, those dumped, broken melons.

No to price rises! Love it...

The final thing to say about these Route Bleue dioramas by Altaya is that they are both plentiful and not very expensive. On eBay I've been paying anywhere between $10 and $25 for each one, with postage costs to Australia varying from $10 to $20 on top. On average each is costing about $30-$35 in my hand.

And they are plentiful, there's no shortage of them, so they're not exactly 'collectable' in the sense of being rare or valuable. I like that 'ordinary and common' thing about them. I'm not interested in 'capitalist collecting' – doing it to make a buck. I plan to keep every model I ever buy just because I like them – and I really do love these charming French dioramas by Altaya.

Feeding the masses

Having blogged about the Peugeot J7 van in the movie 'The Grocer's Son' a while back, this is something like Part Two of that little obsession, as I have added two more French foodie vans to my diecast cabinet, and I love them both. Let's start with the Peugeot J7 van.

This is a 'Friterie' van, a seller of hot chips to never-ending queues of lovers of 'pommes frite',
the ubiquitous snack of France and Belgium. Somehow the van has been magically transported
to a spot outside the Bondi Beach Pavilion here in Sydney in my diorama fantasy. There's no
chance of this ever happening in reality, as the Bondi Parking Gendarmes would be onto the
Friterie man's little Peugeot J7 van in a flash, moving him on as soon as they ate their chips.

Having been moved on to a quieter side street, business is as brisk as ever. I do love the attention
to detail in these 1:43 models. The maker has included deep-fryers, mesh scoops for the chips,
buckets of chips on the counter and, though you can't see it here, a mesh rangehood screen
over the deep-fryers. The Peugeot van itself is nothing special at all, in fact it's a bit knocked
about, and one of the wheels is a bit wobbly. What the maker must do is find old models
cheaply, then transform them into his little dioramas. The guy who makes them is in France,
his name is Daniel Lardon, his business is called Maquettes Collections Passion, his eBay
shop is called Passion1948, and he has a blog at maquettescollectionspassions.unblog.fr

The second modified van from the same guy is my wife's favourite model by far, and I think it
is my favourite, too. And so I've pulled out all of my amateur Photoshopping tricks here and
have included three shoppers and a fruit seller inside the van to complete this diorama. The front
third of the van itself is a Citroen Type H van. The rear two-thirds is mostly made by the
diorama guy, but he does use the rear wheels and housing from the Type H, of course. 

The attention to detail here is exquisite (by the model maker, I mean). Not just content with
generic vegies, there are 19 boxes on the counter, and each has a different type of vegie or fruit
in it: cantaloupes, tomatoes, leeks, oranges, parsley, bananas, eggplants, potatoes, onions,
apples, lemons, avocados and, of course, a set of scales in the middle. It is so charming!
So I have tried to do it justice by adding in a nice old shopping couple and a cheery fruit seller.

My only problem with these lovely models is a relative lack of both finance and space to have as many as I'd like. I can imagine the many hours of work that go into hand-making each model, and so I don't begrudge Daniel Lardon a single Franc of his fee. I have two of Mr Maquette Passion's dioramas, plus the previously featured Charcuterie van from Atlas. That might almost be enough for now, but 'never' is a fateful word to risk uttering, and so there's just a slim chance I might bump out the foodie van collection to four or, what the heck, five models, but with a lack of both money and space, the next ones will have to be good to merit inclusion alongside the wonderful trio I already have.

The Grocer's Son

Lots of diecast model collectors have probably watched a movie and noticed some kind of car that pokes the little devil inside them who says "I want one of those". Normally it might be a flash sports car driven by our movie hero (or the baddie), but I'm afraid my tastes are so broad-ranging that anything with wheels on it is likely to set me off. And that's how I began my so-far-fruitless quest for the van driven by the protagonist in the French movie, 'The Grocer's Son'.

That movie van, I have discovered, is a Peugeot J7. Now, Peugeot J7 vans are not quite a dime a dozen in 1:43 scale, but there are dozens of them for sale at any one time on eBay. But they're not the proper Grocer's Son vans by any stretch, and I want one of those. Fortunately, the quest has not been completely without its delights – as I have come across this charming Citroen Type H Charcuterie van.

For this little diorama I have parked the Citroen Type H van of the Charcuterie purveyor
J Morice, of Saujon, outside a charming French country house. Monsieur Morice is doing his
daily rounds, taking his shop to all the many small villages and farmhouses in his area, selling
his hams, cold meats, sausages and other delicious delights of French cuisine. And this is what
the Grocer's Son did in the movie, except he sold groceries of all sorts. By the way, this 1:43
model is made by Atlas, and while it's hard to photograph, the inside of the 'shop' part of the
van model has a nice little decal on the wall of the hams, sausages etc Mr Morice has for sale.

Here's a still from the 'Grocer's Son' movie of the Peugeot J7 in all its glory, and what a
magnificent mobile shop it is, too (although when you see the trailer clip from You Tube below,
you will realise that those awnings on telescopic damper supports are not to be entirely trusted).
However, you can see why Iam holding out in search of a real mobile shop-style Peugeot J7
van. All the other J7 models for sale on eBay don't open and close. They do nothing.

This poster for the movie ('fils' means son and L'Epicier means grocer)
shows the van in folded down mode, climbing its way up to another
tiny hilltop village. The standard J7 Peugeot van is shorter in the tail
than this longer, modified one, but I have seen quite a few of these
J7 vans in full 1:1 size for sale online, and there must have been a
steady trade in custom Peugeot J7conversions for the French
body-building industry.

Now that I have arrived at the movie poster (the movie screened here in Australia in 2009, and was made in 2007), it's on to the trailer, courtesy of You Tube. The van features heavily from about the 18-second mark onwards in this 90-second trailer.




The film itself was one of my favourites that year, and while I won't go into full movie review mode here, it was in part a film about the passing of a way of life. Apparently, these mobile shops are disappearing from the villages of France, and that was one of the themes of this movie, amongst other things. Apparently, most of the crusty old French villagers who got small speaking (and grumbling) parts in the movie were the real-deal hilltop villagers too.


And so, one of these days, I'll come across a proper Peugeot J7 van in 1:43 scale, decked out to take groceries to the old folk in the hills. Both the Peugeot J7 van and the Citroen Type H have an interesting history, and so in honour of good, sensible but hardly sexy vehicle-building, I'll quickly run through the basic facts about them, to finish.


The Citroen Type H (my charcuterie van) was designed secretly by the French during the Second World War, then appeared soon after, in 1947. It used the 1.9 litre, four-cylinder petrol engine and gearbox from the famous Traction Avant front-wheel drive car, and the corrrugated bodywork (which is reminiscent of a Junkers airplane) was simple to press, light and strong. Diesel engines became available later on, and this van, usually made in a drab, grey colour, was produced from 1947 all the way through to 1981. Total production run was just under half a milion (437,289). Got the French post-war economy rolling again, did the Citroen Type H van.

The Peugeot J7 appeared later, 1965-1980 was its run, and like the Citroen it too used car engines (from Peugeots, of course), 1.6 litre petrol engines and 2.1 litre diesels mostly. Like the Citroen Type H van, the Peugeot J7 was also front-wheel drive.

I'll keep on looking for the Grocer's Van. I've got a few eBay searches saved, using different search words, and I see them as being like dangled lines in a fishpond: one of these days I hope to get a nibble from a French grocer-on-wheels, and I'll pounce.