Compagnie Française de Matériel Ferroviaire

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The Compagnie Française de Matériel Ferroviaire ( CFMF ) was a French manufacturer of railroad cars from Balbigny . The company existed from 1920 to 1988. In the 1970s, it also briefly produced a luxury sports car called the Monica 560 .

Company history

The company was founded in 1920 as Ateliers et Chantiers de Balbigny . In the first few years it manufactured tank locomotives and railway wagons. As a result of the global economic crisis, business slackened at the beginning of the 1930s, so that operations were ultimately closed in 1934. In 1936 Arnaud Tastevin took over the plant, renamed the company to Compagnie Française de Produits Métallurgiques (CFPM) and turned it into a scrapping company. Until the late 1950s, CFPM mainly dismantled old locomotives and railroad cars. At that time the company had only a few employees. In 1960 or 1964 - there are different statements about this - Jean Tastevin, Arnaud Tastevin's son, took over the company. Under his leadership, it resumed the design and manufacture of railroad cars. The scope of production mainly included tank wagons , as well as container transporters. The workforce grew rapidly and by the end of the decade the company, which was renamed Compagnie Française de Matériels Ferroviaire (CFMF) in 1969, was already producing 300 railcars a year. During the expansion phase, the attempt to set up automobile production also fell, but failed in 1975. In 1978 Tastevin sold the company to Simotra SA , and five years later it was taken over by its competitor Arbel Fauvet Rail . The buyers continued to use the brand name CFMF for a few years, but production fell significantly. In the mid-1980s, three quarters of the CFMF's workforce were laid off. 1988 ended the construction of railroad cars in Balbigny; the parent company gradually relocated production to Romania . The plants in Balbigny were used by various independent companies until 2012, including a plastics processing company.

Automobile production

2 prototypes: on the right an early vehicle and on the left a late draft that was not completed
Built by CFMF: the four-door Monica 560 sports car

In the mid-1960s, Jean Tastevin decided to expand into the automotive sector. The external trigger was the bankruptcy of Facel Vega , through which France lost its only manufacturer of luxury vehicles. Tastevin intended to fill this gap with his car. He commissioned Chris Lawrence and Ted Martin one after the other to develop a suitable engine and had body designs and prototypes built both at Williams & Pritchard in Great Britain and Vignale in Italy. The contract was ultimately awarded to a four-door hatchback sedan with pop-up headlights designed by Robert Collinée and Tony Rascanu. The idea of ​​an own engine was discarded in favor of a 5.6 liter eight-cylinder engine from Chrysler . The car was thus a so-called hybrid . Between 1967 and 1973, CFMF in Balbigny produced a total of 25 prototypes, two of them with Chrysler engines. Series production should also take place here; even the body should be pressed at CFMF. In 1974, the serial production of the car called Monica began, the model name of which was based on the first name of Tastevin's wife. By 1975 there were about eight production models of the Monica, which differed in detail and were offered for a purchase price of £ 14,000. They competed with the similarly conceived De Tomaso Deauville and Iso Fidia . However, interest in the Monica was so low that Tastevin stopped production in 1975. The reasons for the failure were the oil crisis, which generally led to a significant drop in sales in the luxury class automobiles sector, and the manufacturer's lack of image. Tastevin sold the rights to the construction to the British manufacturer Panther Westwinds , who, however, did not build a single copy.

literature

  • Roger Gloor: All cars from the 1970s: 231 car brands from 34 countries in over 950 photos. Motorbuch Verlag 2005, ISBN 978-3613024403 .
  • Harald H. Linz, Halwart Schrader : The International Automobile Encyclopedia . United Soft Media Verlag, Munich 2008, ISBN 978-3-8032-9876-8 , chapter Monica.

Web links

Commons : Compagnie Française de Matériel Ferroviaire  - Collection of images, videos and audio files