Seven Decades Ago, One Man Tried Making Trucking More Efficient By Eliminating The Truck

The straight truck is a critical component of logistics. These trucks are champions at hauling short-haul freight, moving families across the town or the country, and doing any kind of work that you don’t need a big tractor-trailer for. But these trucks also tend to be smaller than their heavy hauler counterparts. In 1950, the Fageol Twin Coach company tried to create the best of both worlds with the CargoLiner. This weird vehicle was essentially a self-propelled semi-truck trailer, offering the high capacity of a highway truck with the maneuverability and potential cost savings of a straight truck.

A straight truck is generally defined as a truck where the cargo area and cab are a single unit. A U-Haul box truck is a straight truck, as is a concrete mixer truck, a fire engine, a flatbed truck, a refrigerated truck, and more. Straight trucks are great for short-haul freight loads, moving companies, furniture delivery, utility services, construction, or really any other situation where having a tractor and a trailer would either be overkill or implausible. The smallest straight trucks are also great for maneuvering around a city.

Today’s largest straight trucks also get pretty wild. You can buy semis like the Freightliner Cascadia as a big and beefy straight truck. FedEx Custom Critical trucks are often Class 8 tractors complete with sleepers and the capability that comes with a heavy-duty platform. These trucks are sometimes called Expeditor Trucks as they’re often used by operators who may need to haul a time-sensitive load long distance.

The major downside to the straight truck is that jurisdictions limit how long they can be. For example, my home state of Illinois says that the maximum overall length of a straight truck cannot be longer than 42 feet. That’s the total length, including cab and box.

Back in 1950, Twin Coach produced something wild. The CargoLiner wanted to be the best of both worlds. This was a commercial vehicle with the capacity of a tractor-trailer, but with the length, maneuverability, and single-unit construction of a straight truck.

Decades Of Innovation

Twin Coach was known for inventive ideas like this. This was the company that built a bread van that replicated how a horse worked. Twin Coach was also famous for its buses, which achieved higher passenger capacities than the competition through a clever use of two engines. The Twin Coach story started with a different company, the Fageol Motor Company, and here’s what you need to know from a previous piece:

The Twin Coach concern begins with brothers William B. and Frank R. Fageol, which you would pronounce as “fadjl.” Per coachbuilt.com, they were born in the Midwest in the late 19th century and apparently took a liking to buses early on. William was only 19 when in 1899 he joined forces with one of his other brothers, Rollie, in owning and operating a steam-powered bus at a fairground. Later that same year, the two brothers would build their first gas-powered car.

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Fageol Motors claim to fame was the 1922 Safety Coach, a vehicle sometimes credited as being the first purpose-built bus. Most buses in the early days of motoring were coach bodies on top of a truck chassis. The Fageol brothers saw this as a bad thing as trucks rode high and had particularly jarring suspensions. The Fageol had a custom frame and an aluminum body with a low floor, which was optimized for use as a bus. The Safety Coach had wide all-weather tires, air brakes, and interior heating via water heated by the engine. The Safety Coach was so advanced for its day that some in the bus world claim that it changed the bus technology forever.

Eventually, Fageol Motor was sold to the American Car and Foundry Company of Ohio in 1925, but the Fageol brothers weren’t done yet. In 1927, William and Frank split off on their own adventure as they came up with their next big idea, the Twin Coach, and formed a company of the same name to produce it.

The Twin Coach was a huge deal. Not only did this transit bus feature a body and chassis integrated into one, but the dual-engine buses were instrumental in helping urban transit operations fill out practical bus fleets. Twin Coach was so proficient at building great buses that it spent two lucrative decades as America’s second-largest producer of transit buses.

Unfortunately, as the Old Motor writes, Twin Coach became a victim of the dominance of General Motors. As transit authorities overwhelmingly purchased GM buses, players like Twin Coach and Flxible were left fighting for the scraps, leading to sales declines. But this is Twin Coach and the Fageols we’re talking about here. Twin Coach decided to diversify and grab the attention of truckers.

In late 1950, Twin Coach announced the Fageol Super Freighter, a truck that was unlike anything else. The Super Freighter was pretty much just a trailer with its own drivetrain and a small cab plastered onto its front end. In November 1950, Louis J. Fageol, Frank’s son, had filed for a design patent on the Fageol TC CargoLiner. At the time, Louis had been at the helm of the family company since 1943. Louis had that Fageol family spirit in him and was known for being a successful speedboat racer and racecar builder.

Louis is credited as the inventor and designer of the CargoLiner in both the patent and period reporting. What’s wild is that one demonstrator was built and was used in an effort to score a U.S. Army contract for 1,650 vehicles. However, as a patent filing in 1953 shows, Louis had ambitions beyond military use, from the patent:

Heretofore a long-felt unfilled need and demand has existed in the trucking industry for low-cost high-capacity single unit vehicles. However, this need has not been met by prior vehicle designs, except for specially designed and manufactured units which high costs have rendered commercially impractical. Hence, this unfilled need of the trucking industry has continued to exist largely because of the fact that the potential commercial market for such vehicles is too limited to achieve sufficiently low production costs.

As a result of the failure of heavy-duty truck manufacturers to furnish vehicles to meet this need, the trucking industry has turned to extensive use of tractor-drawn semi-trailers and uses them in applications where straight, single unit vehicles of sufficient capacity are better adapted. The reason for this is that the practical market for semitrailers is very broad as compared to markets for straight trucks. Semi-trailers are therefore produced in large volume at low unit production cost thereby giving them a competitive advantage over straight trucks of comparable capacity, prior to the present novel method of manufacture disclosed herein.

Due to high volume manufacture of trailers, trailer manufacturers have been able to devote considerable development work to improvement of trailer bodies. As a result, they have succeeded in engineering a considerable amount of weight out of trailer body units, thereby increasing pay load without sacrificing strength. However, this increased pay load capacity is largely offset by the weight of the tractor required to pull the trailer. Moreover, the use of such trailers results in lower payload capacity under most state laws regulating total gross.

Louis goes on to note that the semi-trailers of the 1950s were prone to jackknifing during sudden stops, a problem Twin Coach’s design was said to fix – and more. The TC CargoLiner starts with a body, and if you think that this thing looks like a converted truck trailer, you aren’t far off. The Fruehauf Trailer Corporation built a stainless steel body for the rig. According to the Canadian Transportation magazine in December 1950, the CargoLiner, which was still being called the Super Freighter then, was built around Fruehauf’s standard trailer design. The truck looks and functions like a typical trailer, too, until you get to the front. That’s where you’ll find the cab.

Under the body sat a unique chassis. According to a 1950 issue of Commercial Car Journal, the Super Freighter was supposed to use Fageol underfloor inline engines, making between 162 HP and 250 HP. These would have been the same engines found in Twin Coach buses. In this application, they could have been made to run on gasoline or propane.

The demonstrator used a propane engine from a Twin Coach bus, and a later version was supposed to use a Leyland diesel engine. The truck was to be stopped using Bendix-Westinghouse air brakes and shifted through a choice of Brownies, Clark, and Spicer transmissions. The production truck was supposed to have a rear axle from either Clark, Eaton, or Timken.

The Commercial Car Journal article went pretty deep, noting that the production truck would have used an Exide battery, a 106-gallon fuel tank, and either a 25-amp Delco generator or a Leece-Neville alternator. Up front, the driver got an extremely basic cab with only the basics needed to safely command the rig. The controls were hydraulically actuated and what was unique up front was the dual wheel steer axle, which sat on a bogie they used Vickers power steering and Gemmer steering gear.

In most vehicles, steering is achieved through turning the front wheels. The TC CargoLiner worked like a more complicated version of the red Radio Flyer wagon you had as a kid, and the hydraulics actually turned the entire bogey rather than the wheels.

This was great for maneuverability as a driver could technically jackknife the CargoLiner into a dock or space with greater ease than any typical truck.

According to Fleet Owner magazine, using the rigid front axle and steering bogie meant that the Super Freighter, which measured 35 feet, had a turn radius of just 39 feet and 6 inches. Period newspaper articles also claimed that going with the bogey meant that Twin Coach could go with a burly dual front wheel setup. Twin Coach was also said to offer a typical front axle in the proposed production version.

Put it all together, and Twin Coach said that buying a Super Freighter/TC CargoLiner meant getting a truck that had the same payload as a typical tractor-trailer setup, but was on average 8 feet to 10 feet shorter, thanks to not having a tractor up front. Twin Coach also noted that you’d save about 8,000 pounds of weight compared to a typical tractor-trailer, too. As Business Week noted in 1950, states were also restricting the total length of trucks, so the Super Freighter was also supposed to be a bit of a cheat code there, too. The best part is that according to the patent, a truck like this could be sold for 20 percent cheaper than a typical semi.

According to Bus Transportation magazine in 1951, Twin Coach delayed the production of the TC CargoLiner due to the Korean War. This idea did not die with the sole Super Freighter that was built. Twin Coach also introduced the Fageol Twin Coach Convertible during the same time period. This looked somewhat similar to a Twin Coach bus, but had the Fruehauf body of the Super Freighter, a 477 Fageol gasoline bus engine, and an interior that could be quickly converted between passenger and freight roles. The Army liked this idea and ordered nearly 1,600 “F-32-F” coaches for over $20 million. Other examples of this design became highway post offices.

As for the Super Freighter, Twin Coach took the patent from that and created the Fageol Van, which entered production in the early 1950s. These trucks followed the same formula of being almost all cargo body with only a tiny cab slapped on the front. Twin Coach sold them in 20-foot to 35-foot lengths. Like the Super Freighter, the Fageol Van was marketed with the promise of providing more cargo volume in the same space that you’d get in other trucks.

Advertisements for the Fageol Van showed a 20-foot Fageol Van next to a typical 20-foot cabover truck. The marketing claimed that a 20-foot Fageol Van had 16 feet of cargo room compared to just 14 feet of cargo room for the typical cabover truck with the same overall length. Twin Coach also said that a Fageol Van, which carried up to 33,000 pounds, had a better payload rating than the competition. In case you’re curious, these things had top speeds of around just 45 mph.

Notably missing from Fageol Vans was the weird steering bogie from the demonstrator. But the production trucks did come with drivetrains and chassis from International Harvester. Advertisements said that the IH running gear meant that Fageol Vans technically had a service network of over 7,000 dealers, which is where the Fageol Vans were also sold.

In 1952, Flxible purchased Twin Coach’s bus business, and Twin Coach continued to march forward on the sales of Fageol Vans and Pony Express postal trucks. The Fageol Vans turned out to be especially popular with moving companies. Sadly, in 1956, production of the Fageol Van and the Pony Express ceased when the factory in Kent, Ohio, closed.

Twin Coach would then see its subsidiaries closed and sold off, with the company itself changing its name to Twin Industries in 1962, only to get absorbed into Bell Aircraft in 1963. Flxible stopped using the Twin Coach name on buses in 1962 and the last time the Twin Coach name was used on a vehicle was on some light-duty buses built by an unrelated company operating out of Twin Coach’s old Kent factory.

Ultimately, the idea of an all-in-one integrated truck and trailer never really caught on in the long run. Today, straight trucks are still largely conventional trucks with cubes bolted to them. If you need a truck that’s smaller, you’ll get something like an Isuzu NPR, and if you need the full capability of a highway tractor, then you’ll just go that route.

The TC CargoLiner was properly wild. It was little more than a trailer with a seat, a couple of windows, and an engine, but this weird design had a lot of promise. But it’s also a bit of a product of its day when truckers had fewer choices in the marketplace. There’s not really anyone racing to make a modern Super Freighter. Still, it’s such an awesome part of trucking history that, sadly, might be forgotten if it weren’t for the enthusiasts trying to keep Twin Coach documentation alive. It’s a shame, because I’d love to know how this thing drove.