Tramlines 2016-3 Fall

(Continued from page 5)
of a smaller but related model doesn’t
include one:
Youtube
Motive power could be provided by either
diesel or gasoline powered engines
and one assumes, given the company’s
decision to stay with gasoline postwar,
that the BC Electric’s vehicles were gasoline
powered. Both engines were manufactured
by Hercules Manufacturing
Company of Canton, Ohio, though the
gasoline version incorporated several
Fageol-inspired modifications and was
known as Fageol-Hercules.
This choice of engine supplier may appear
surprising since Fageol and Hall
Scott --which also produced gasoline engines--
were under common ownership.
The answer lies in the complex web of
takeovers, buyouts and financing that
happened in the late 1920s.
The Fageol brothers, having sold their
company to American Car & Foundry,
became disillusioned with their position
within the new combine. They left to design
and build a new transit bus with
‘twin-engines’.
The new company was known legally as
the Twin Coach Co. Within a few years,
American Car & Foundry would cease
using the Fageol name, it would begin
design of the famous Brill range of transit
and intercity buses, and, after WW2,
Twin would try to compete against it
with a new ’Bomber-nose’ bus.
Incidentally, in this later Twin Coach
design, the engine would return to its
mid-ship position; some buses would
even be produced with twin-engines (including
some for BCER), and most
would be gasoline or propane powered.
The Twin Coach company recognized
the supremacy of the diesel engine —
championed by GMC— much too late.
It tried a joint venture with Canadian
Leyland to fit one its’ diesels below floor
in much the same way as CCF/Brill’s
English-sourced AEC.
But it was not a success, failed to arrest
the downward trend in orders, and eventually
Twin Coach would be absorbed by
GMC’s only real competitor in the sixties
and seventies- Flexible.