Kegresse.dk
Kégresse in Austria
The challenge of the history of Kégresse in Austria is to know how many cars are still existing in Austria!
Most probabily only one: it is at the Technical Museum in Vienna. It is not displayed but stored in magazines. It is said that the museum consider the car without display value...
Based on our research, we have learned that there have been several Kégresses in service at the postal service, all of type P 15N.
Wilfried Pleiter has provided a great assistance to get the last cars in place, Thanks Freddy! Freddy hompage HERE
Pascal Honneger has contributed a lot to document the number of postal cars. Dowload the leaflet Pascal Honneger has made about the P15 in Austria HERE
In addition, there have been at least 4 pcs. of type P 19 in the Fire department on the outskirts of Vienna.
And a least one P17 from the Liezen district road administration.
If there have been others Kégrese in Austria we do not know at this time, but if anyone can contribute more information, we are very grateful!
Allgemeine Automobil Zeitung
Automobil-Zeitung, the magazin of the Automobil club has written about Kégresse cars in general and locally.
Download and read all of them, make some comment if you have, we are not good to read german! We may have overlooked something.
Both Danish and French magazine has published a picture of a P15N from Austria.
The postal cars
At present we know that there have been 9-10 pcs. P 15N in service.
At least 6 of it had a 7 person body with removable fabric top, and small luggage rack behind.
At least 3 have had a slightly longer 11 person body, also with removable fabric top, without room for luggage.
Read the dossier about the postal cars: a massive 43 pages story HERE
Note that several of them have wheel guards on the back.
It indicated that they could be converted to regular wheels on summer! This is a unique news I have seen only once in a press photo from Petera Coachwork from Chekoslovakia.
Does anyone know more about these summer conversions?
The Fire brigade cars
When you search for Kégresse and Austria, you will find the picture on the right, and no more information are found, except from a litle from this website.
Recently was realesed the book writen by Carrington and Reiter, about the Rosenbauer Coachworrk in Lintz, who was specialised on Fire brigade cars and trucks.
They write:
"One unique example in the range of chassis employed by Rosenbauer is certainly the Citroën Kegresse C6, which was supplied to the Vienna Professional Fire Service in the 1930s as a half-track"
and
"The half-track on a Citroën Kegresse C6 chassis delivered to the Vienna Professional Fire Service in 1931 was equipped with a 6-cylinder, gasoline engine (45 hp). With a dead weight of 3.500 kg. the C6 carried a portable pump (400 l/min at 10 bar), three hook and one, two-section scaling ladder. In winter a snowplow could be mounted. In order to fight fires in the Vienna Woods, this vehicle was fitted with a 500 l tank trailer as an immediate water reserve. Two years later, another three Kegresse vehicles went into service as water trucks, but these were modified in the workshops of the main fire department in Dobling."
Link to the publisher where you can buy the book: Lentia.at
The P17 snowplow of the Liezen District
In the Automobil-Zeitung newspaper from 1 January 1931, a test is reported with a Citroën-Kégresse P17 fitted with a snow plow. The test was performed by the Liezen district road administration.
Read it HERE, and if you can translate the article into English we will be happy!
