A few weeks back we looked at the Dyson Land Liner coach, which was essentially a trailer bus with the prime mover tractor replaced by a front-mounted powered bogey. It was an interesting experiment that had its genesis in the World War II environment of increased passenger loads and scarcity of key materials. The US faced these same conditions and one operator came up with a very similar solution.
1940 White Transit Coach
1940 ACF-Brill Intercity Coach
In 1942, the US government constructed what was then the largest ammunition factory in the world – 10,747 acres (43.492 km²), employing over 12,000 employees, just outside Kansas City. Getting all those workers to the factory required an extensive public transportation network. Buses would be the primary element – with Santa Fe Trailways Lines being a key contractor. But new buses required quite a bit of scarce materials – steel, rubber, etc. Santa Fe looked for some “out-of-the-box” alternatives to the then current coaches that were 35 feet long and could hold around 33 seated passengers.
Like Dyson, they settled on a large trailer body with a swiveling front-powered bogey. However, instead of steel, they used a new type of reinforced plywood to construct the body. Plywood was in much greater supply and would also result in a lighter coach – similar in thought to the superb De Havilland Mosquito twin-engined, multi-role fighter then in use by the Royal Air Force.
The plywood body was similar to other large trailer buses, except it was a “deck and a half” – with a single front seating area in the front one-third, and upper and lower seating aft. It had significantly more doors than a typical coach to speed loading and unloading.
Its seated carrying capacity was 117, so I assume that seating was a rather tight “three and two” versus the usual “two and two” per row. Very little other information on length, width, or powertrain exists. I’ll hazard a guess and say it was approximately 45 feet long and 8 feet wide, and likely had a large Hall-Scott SOHC gas six cylinder, which was one of the most powerful over-the-road engines at the time.
It appears the driver was seated farther back in the trailer portion, just based on some of the pictures.
While several were planned, it looks like just one was built – and as it was in use almost 24 hours a day shuttling workers over three shifts, the plywood body probably wore out fairly quickly.
Another interesting one-off creation developed when wartime circumstances forced many to improvise.
Looks like the Spruce Goose Bus! Wonder if smoking was allowed on the way to the munitions factory? What an oddball bus.
Speaking of improvising with wood during WWII, I’ve stumbled upon photos of cars with wooden bumpers, like this one with Rita Hayworth and her Continental (I believe it’s a ‘41).
But that’s nothing like the stories I’ve heard of folks who crafted wooden tires to keep their cars rolling (literally) when tires were rationed. Talk about a bumpy ride!
There are stories about very early ’46s being delivered new with wooden bumpers, the metal ones arriving later when chrome supplies freed up.
Coppola showed a Cadillac that had been shipped like that in The Godfather.
I knew about that being the case post-war, but I was surprised to see people scrapping bumpers on relatively new cars during the war.
I wonder if all those doors mean that at least some rows of seats didn’t have an aisle – would be worth 10 seats or so.
Good point. Would be similar to early railway coaches.
And of course not all 117 have to have seats, I would imagine there would be a fair number of standees.
Excellent series Mr. Brophy!
Quite obviously so, the apparent reason being that there wasn’t enough headroom on the lower level for a proper aisle. More like a low-headroom basement than a proper first floor.
To be fair the upper deck doesn’t look a lot better!
I think you’re absolutely right John – my guess is the 4 doors to the lower compartment led to seats with no isle – seating maybe 6-8 across… JIm
Another great find and research Jim. I actually prefer the futuristic art deco styling of the Dyson Landliner. I find the exterior design on the Victory Liner somewhat busy. With the appearance of a ‘high forehead’ reminiscent of the Airbus A380.
Oh yeah, the dreaded Qantas (pack ’em in like sardines) Airbus A380. On recents flights to Aus and back to visit family, my wife and I endured 15.5 hours tight tourist seating in an A380 double decker aluminum flying tube of compressed agony across the Pacific from LA to Melbourne. Then a repeat experience back from Sydney to LA sitting next to the constantly whinging and thrashing Minneapolis, Minnesota, lawyer who repeatedly told us he was a lawyer, deserving better. He was obviously oblivious that we too were tightly squeezed in next to him, but also had to endure him, as well as the tight seating. Definitely not a “No worries” pleasure, but an A380 flight experience, no doubt, worthy of one of Dante’s lower levels of Hell. Not one of our better flights.
My wife who rarely complains said, “Never again, unless we fly business class lay down seats”. At least now, going forward, when we see an A380 we’ll be able to laugh and see pictures of a railway cattle-car in our heads. Moo!
The A380 seating experience made the Boeing 737 seating roominess on our domestic US transcontinental flight from LA to home seem like expansive business class spacing in comparison.
Obviously the Santa Fe Trailways led the way for Qantas with their A380 seating configuration to provide the modern sardine experience, but hopefully Trailways did so without whinging, whining lawyers as seatmates.
So, Ah, the A380, quite the airplane!
According to Seatguru, the Qantas A380 Economy class seat is 31″ pitch and 17.5″ wide, pretty standard for long haul. Air NZ is a hair better at 32-33″. But any economy class is painful when the flights are that long.
Try Spirit Airlines with a knee-cracking 28″ pitch. Thomas Cook does transatlantics with as little as 28″
The 380s may be technically advanced, but they’re ugly and don’t have the beautiful lines of the old 747, which is still the “Queen of the Skies” IMO. I am really surprised that on a plane this large the economy seating is so miserable. Don’t they also have a Premiuim economy class that is a step up from cattle-class?
The 380 has been a commercial flop, selling fewer than expected, and its production may very likely end in a few years. New orders have dried up. Airlines prefer to fly smaller twin-engine planes like the 787, which allows profitable flights from smaller cities direct to international destinations. The whole concept of giant planes has become obsolete.
So true. Even the 747 is on its last legs as a passenger carrier. The A380 only made sense for airlines such as Emirates and Singapore, with high-density routes from gate-limited airports to their regional hubs. And even Emirates is looking to pull out of its remaining A380 orders.
The following is an explanation of the changes in commercial aviation causing the decline of the jumbo jets. Hopefully this augments Paul’s thoughts.
It would be kind of ironic if big planes like this end up on super busy short haul commuter routes, to maximize the head count per take off slot. Remember when it was announced with the usual cocktail lounge and gym fantasy?
Use of big planes on short haul commuter routes was tried in the 1970’s and generally failed. JAL used dense-pack 425 seat 747’s domestically and PSA made the mistake of buying an L-1011 for LAX-SFO runs. It takes too long to unload and load passengers on a jumbo to be worth the trouble. Southwest and Aloha could turn an older, smaller 737 in ten minutes.
Those plywood bodies no doubt kept the maintenance guys busy with caulk and paint.
Good thing the war was so short! 🙂
Plywood was used in all kinds of vehicles then, including the famous PT boats.They lasted long enough for McHale’s Navy!
I was a big fan of Ernest Borgnine as McHale, but always cringed when they showed his boat which clearly was not a WWII PT. However, the boat used in actual opening and cruising scenes was a British designed raised deck Vosper motor torpedo boat built in the USA in the mid 1940s for export and modified by the studio to look like a WWII PT.
Elco PTs hulls were made of two layers of double diagonal one inch thick (each) mahogany planking utilizing a “ply” of glue-impregnated cloth layer between inner and outer planks. These planks were held together by copper rivets and bronze screws, lots of bronze screws.
I know this arcane data because, from 1955 to [about] 1970, I helped my father work on his slowly aging post war Elco cruiser whose hull was of similar construction and needed very labor intensive care and repair each spring.
In the early 1940s the term “plywood derby” was used to describe the US Government PT competition between boat manufacturers Elco, Higgins, and Huckins. All three companies eventually built PTs for the war effort which, as the original post indicates, was an all out effort on the part of both the US military and US civilians.
Photo shows second generation Elco 80 foot PTs.
Thanks. I remember reading the same thing a long time ago. I had not watched this show since the 60s, but I just watched the first episode on Youtube this afternoon. And yes, I could tell that PT73 was not a genuine PT boat nor the same as the opening footage, which was clearly some high quality Navy footage. Very Hollywood sound stage.
I wonder what they repurposed for PT73.
“They Were Expendable” (1945) has lots of great footage of PT boats, and is based on the exploits of the PT boat squadron in the Philippines at the start of the war – the guys who ultimately ferried MacArthur to Mindanao.
Indeed. The clip below was included in my COAL Introduction back in early 2016.
The boats in the clip are second gen 80 foot Elcos; the squadron boats that they are portraying were first gen 77 footers.
http://www.tcm.com/mediaroom/video/475633/They-Were-Expendable-Movie-Clip-Those-Are-Jap-Planes.html
How would the driver steer that? Was there any kind of power steering available for trucks at the time? I remember a GMC tank prototype having it in the early 40s
Yes, there were some experimental hydraulically assisted power steering units being tested at the time – the Dyson Landliner had one. My guess is this had one too. Jim.
F. W. Davis began filing patent applications for power steering systems in the late 1920s, so it is not hard to imagine that such a system could be practical fifteen years later. It is my understanding that American auto manufacturers (particularly GM) could have had power steering in production cars sooner than the early 50s but they did not want to pay royalties and waited for the main Davis patent to expire.
The question for me is not so much about the weight of the steering, but rather how you would separate turning the steering column from the rotation of the kingpin connection between the power unit and the body of the bus. Just using any sort of conventional steering column would result in uncontrolled inputs!
Otherwise, just a big wheel and lots of gearing. Vision sitting that far back with a high window line would be pretty challenging too in the wrong situations.
Sunflower Ammunition plant wasn’t really ‘remote’… it’s 30 miles west of KC. The Army built a city to house the workers, but still had to haul more in from KC. The barracks were vacant for decades, then got converted into low-rent suburban housing in the ’80s. It’s now called Clearview City.
Thanks – I’ll correct above. Jim.
It entirely lacks the deco brio of the Dyson, no? That looked like an shiny aero futurebus from a ’40’s cartoon. This, front-on, looks like a nun from the pre-Vatican 2 era (think boss nun in Sound of Music rather than Sally Field). My, what a huge forehead you have. (In Melbourne, those old outfits were disrespectfully called Destination Boards after their resemblance to the ones on trams, but I’m digressing).
More oddly, the Victory Liner tries to cover up the bendy-bogey bit at the front ( the Dyson made a spatted feature of it) so the shots of it turning and splitting horizontally – well, I’d assume I really shouldn’t have had that last drink before trying to board this thing, either that, or man, this mother is BROKEN!
The levels of innovation and of super-fast productive ramp-up in WW2 will never cease to fascinate, and not just the Allies side either.
A wooden bus doesn’t seem so strange if you grew up in a city that was still dutifully employing 80 y.o. wooden trams in everyday service till maybe 6 or so years ago. Btw, if you fancy trying out a wooden Melbourne-made tram in the US, San Francisco has at least a few running, still in their green and cream outfits.
One last thought. I’d bet pound to a penny that in 1942, every second occupant of 117 in the chemical-impregnated wooden Victory Liner was puffing on a ciggy. Ah well, no risk, no victory. (Actually, one slip and no Victory, but enough).
This machine, and the Dyson, are but 2 examples of the out of box thinking and resolve that exstisted during that time period.
With how little room there is between the trailer and bogie, I would think there would be some serious binding issues going on when driven over transitions on pavement surfaces. Especially when turning.