A Texarkana, Ark. school bus is cruising the autobahn as a German camper

Brittany Cerda and her husband were driving the autobahn outside Mannheim, Germany, when a yellow school bus rolled up in the next lane. That alone was odd. Germany doesn’t have yellow school buses. Then she read the side of it: “TEXARKANA ARKANSAS.”

“We were both confused,” said Cerda, a De Queen native who went to college in Texarkana and is now stationed in Germany with the Air Force. “But when we saw that it was from Texarkana, we immediately took a picture to show my family. It was super funny to see and such a small world moment.”

“We definitely questioned what kind of field trips kids are getting to take now,” she added.

The photo, snapped through the passenger window about 5,000 miles from home, has been making the rounds on social media since. The bus is an AmTran conventional, the International-chassis model that hauled kids around the Four States through the 1990s, complete with a working stop arm and black rub rails.

It isn’t lost, and it isn’t hauling students. The bus matches one converted into a camper by Randy’s American Dream Cars, a classic-car restoration and import shop in Altleiningen-Höningen, a small village in the Rhineland-Palatinate wine region about 25 miles west of Mannheim. Whether the shop still owns it or has since sold it to another camper enthusiast isn’t clear.

According to the shop’s website, the 1995 bus arrived from Texarkana at the end of August 2018 through a German-speaking buyer. The owners set out to turn it into a camper, and the project took about nine months.

The seats came out first. The floor was insulated, and electrical, water and sewer lines were run through the body. The interior was walled off into a kitchen with a dining nook, a bathroom, a bunk bed, a bedroom and a rear utility room that doubles as a garage for a pair of mopeds. The old paint was sanded down and the bus got a fresh coat. The Texarkana lettering was kept, or put back, in the process.

“What sounds so simple here was actually a very bumpy road,” the shop wrote in a translated description of the build, noting the layout had to pass muster with the owner’s wife and child along the way.

The shop also offers to source, inspect and convert American school buses for other German customers.

Texarkana has apparently become a repeat stop for the shop. Its other featured project is a 1952 Dodge B3 pickup that the owners say they found in Texarkana, Ark. after a long search: sun-faded and rusty, but not rusted through. That truck is being rebuilt with a roughly 370-horsepower Chevelle engine on a Chevrolet S10 Blazer 4WD chassis, with only a clear coat over the body to preserve the patina.

Old American school buses have a niche following in Europe, where the look is instantly recognizable from movies and television and rarely seen on the road. Retired buses from U.S. districts are routinely sold at auction and exported for conversion into campers, food trucks and mobile shops.

John Nutt of Nutt Auction Company in Texarkana, Ark., said his firm sells surplus buses for several districts in Arkansas and Texas, and that online bidding has moved hundreds of them to buyers in countries around the world.

“This is the first one that I am aware of that has gone to Germany,” Nutt said. “Very interesting! Would like to have witnessed that.”

How the bus made the jump from the Texarkana Arkansas School District lot to a German buyer is unclear. Several people familiar with the district’s bus shop told TXKtoday a German-born mechanic has worked there, which may explain the connection. The shop’s site says the sale came through a “German-speaking buyer” in Texarkana.