Bus spotters looking for home for 15 relics from the 1950s

A group of bus aficionados have launched a campaign to find a permanent home for 15 vehicles dating from the 1950s that are currently housed in the OSY storage hangars in the central Athens neighborhood of Gazi.

The “Friend of the Bus” group hopes that OSY, the company in charge of Attica’s buses and trolley buses, will transform the hangars into a museum, much as the railway company has done.

“We have created a record of our own experiences and observations as regards public transport in our lifetimes,” the head of the group, Andreas Chronis, told Kathimerini. “Car drivers were our heroes [in the 50s] because there were so few of them they seemed exotic.”

The group has amassed a rich collection of photographs of buses through the decades and has also been responsible for rescuing parts of old buses from scrapyards, which they hope one day can be reassembled for exhibition purposes.