I love station wagons, Citroens, diesels, England, and long, overly chatty web accounts of ridiculous custom projects. And my wife works at NASA.
And yet somehow, I just can't get excited about Phil Collins' [yeah, no, I know, right?] screwball transformation of a normal 1980s CX Estate into a 6-wheel [!?], newspaper delivery wagon-lookin' Loadrunner. Just wall to wall craziness. And for what? I just have no idea.
Oh, and the Benny Hillish URL! The Joy of CX [thejoyofcx.co.uk via dt reader john, who says he's ready to subscribe to dead-tree newspapers again, so long as they are delivered in one of these things]
I think i posted this before when you wrote about the familiale Edition of citroens ds and cx models: the loadrunner is no custom conversion but a plain commercial version within the cx model range (Not sure if there was also a loadrunner version of the ds range). Citroen built them as a regular model which was in fact used very often for newspaper delivery, though not to customers doors but from printer to news stands all over France. This was due to the countries centralized economics: most of newspaper and magazine printing (as also a Lot of other business) was/is happening around Paris. So there had to be a way to deliver medium quantities of goods fast overnight to all ends of the country. Since normal trucks were too large and small vans too slow, in came the loadrunners.
So chances are good to find a loadrunner model on the French car market, but keep in mind that these have been heavily used commercial cars, so they almost every Time will need a Big overhaul. On the other hand: since its Not a custom conversion, there might Be enough parts available...
Hi,
all 6-wheel (or more) citroens (HY, DS, SM, CX, BX, XM, C15, ...) are NOT made by Citroen and Citroen officially doesn't like them!
Major parts of DS, CX, XM (and also jumpy, evasion, C25, C35) was made by the french Pierre TISSIER. CX was made for press shipping like you said but also for ambulance.
The CX Loadrunners like the one in the photo on top was made by the german Mike's Garage.
There was also CX, XM and BX made by the belgium Pijpops.
Today, it is very difficult to find such a car. For the parts, quite everything is taken from the original car, there is only a few little things made specifically. For theses things, we need to rebuild them, there is unfortunatly no stock ...
Olivier
passion-tissier.com