Brock's VW Magazine Online

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Meeting the second type!
Part 3
by Guif from the VBM In the picture below you can see three versions of the panel van, on the right you have the High roof, a kind of mammoth bus, used to carry large objects, but also transformed in small stores, for groceries to sell their products in small villages.

German posts used many of them to stand in little town which weren't big enough to have their own post office, a 5 1/2 feet man was able to stand in it, without curving the back. Some of them have been transformed to carry people to their last home, the bus was able to play any rule in people's life!

The production of busses in the early fifties was essentially composed with panelvans, it has been in this reconstruction period in Europe the best friend of a bunch of workers, because it was not expensive to buy and to use. You may have heard about the story of a bus who was used on a boat only to carry passengers's luggages from the deck to the boat, in twenty years he did about 5.000 miles this stays an exception because panelvans are more frequently lying in junkyards or in the country than in museums.

This article wouldn't be complete without speaking of the ambulances versions produced by Miesen from 1951 with a special rear door to load easily the emergency trailer.

The brother of the ambulance is the firebrigade transporter model, mainly found in germany and switzerland, some of them have been used for 30 years before they were retired. Some were equiped with an extra engine which was a generator or a pump, the must for a VWcollecter.

I'll end this oveview of the Type 2 with a very strange model, built in the late fifties by Beutler, a swiss manufacturer. There are two models known, one in a junkyard, and another in Great-Britain, this model is a based on the Samba bus, but instead of 23 small windows, it has 16 larges and curved windows.

This is the best demonstration that the VWbus was able to fit any needs, there is no other examples of such versatility in the automotive industry.

Guif, from the Virtual Beetle Museum.

WWW.VIRTUALBEETLEMUSEUM.COM

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