This Weird 94-Year-Old Delivery Van Was Engineered To Act Like A Horse

The delivery van is one of the unsung heroes of logistics. Day in and day out, America relies on these little workhorses for all kinds of final deliveries. Decades ago, delivery vans used to look whimsical, like toasters with wheels. The Twin Coach Twin Truck delivery van stands out. Once the backbone of bakeries, farms, and milkmen, it features a unique overall design that optimizes space and yields a standing driving position, plus the drivetrain works in a fascinating way that is meant to emulate a horse’s behavior.

Recently one of these Twin Coach Twin Trucks, a 1931 model, has gone up up for auction in Georgia. Sure, it’s a little worse for wear, but chances are you won’t see another for a long while. Here’s an opportunity to have a fun oddball of a classic car.

Anyway, this auction led me down a rabbit hole, and I’m taking you with me. The name Twin Coach is probably not one many people think about often. Okay, I know I do, but that’s because I’m a bus nerd and there are too many coaches living rent-free in my head. But I wouldn’t expect the rest of the world to really know what Twin Coach is. For decades, Twin Coach brought innovation to buses, but the company also built other, lesser-known vehicles.

Pioneers In Buses

Much of the Twin Coach story is rooted in advancing the bus in the early decades of motoring. 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.

All of the Fageol brothers would try their hands at a handful of automotive projects before moving to California. In 1916, brothers Claude, Frank, Rollie, and William joined forces to form Fageol Motors in Oakland, California. The company’s products included a luxury car, trucks, tractors, and vehicles sent into World War I.

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 another advancement in bus technology. The Fageol brothers married the frame and the body as one, but the big thing, and this is what gave the company its name, was the inclusion of two engines. By duplicating engines, the Fageol brothers found, a trolley bus had enough power to haul huge loads of people. The Kent State University Library continues:

The Fageol Motors and Twin Coach companies were instrumental in the history of public transportation in the United States. The dual-motored “Twin Coach” was the first urban transit or streetcar-type motor coach designed and built by anyone. The Twin Coach Company ranked second in urban bus manufacturing for approximately twenty years, and it sold to major corporations across the country. It also broadened its scope to include the manufacture of airplane parts and machine engines, as well as a new house-to-house mail delivery truck called the “Pony express”.

Not mentioned there is that Twin Coach fell under the ownership of Flxible in the early 1950s. Eventually, the name would die off, just to show up again on another bus. By 1975, the name faded away for good. It’s noted that due to the history of Twin Coach, a common name enthusiasts call the company today is “Fageol-Twin Coach,” but the company was known as Twin Coach.

The Baby Twin Coach Twin Truck

While Twin Coach was known best for its buses, it tried to corner multiple ends of the market of commercial vehicles.

In 1929, Twin Coach introduced the 1-ton Twin Truck delivery van. Despite the naming of the company, the delivery van did not have two engines. However, the Twin Truck was built to the exacting specifications of the customer and was available with a gas engine or with an electric motor and rear-wheel-drive or front-wheel-drive.

The biggest innovation introduced with the Twin Truck was William Fageol’s stand-drive clutch and brake mechanism.

The idea was that delivery people used to horses would find the Twin Truck familiar. Here’s some explanation from the American Truck Historical Society:

These trucks featured a unique, patented operating system that came to Will Fageol one day as he watched a milkman making his rounds with a horse and wagon. The horse would stop at the edge of a yard, and the milkman would walk across the lawn to the front door and make the delivery. The horse would then move to the next yard, where the milkman would meet him and start the routine over.

Why couldn’t a truck do the same thing, Fageol wondered? The answer came in the form of a stand-drive clutch/brake mechanism. When the driver stood on the pedal, the truck moved. When he stepped off the pedal, the vehicle could coast to a stop, doing in effect just what the horse would have done. One driver told of actually “walking” his truck, horse-like, by putting it in its extra low first gear and keeping the right wheels in the curb gutter.

“You almost had time to grab a cup of coffee before the truck got to the next house,” he added. The Twin Truck, with its stand-drive mechanism, proved a success — one particularly well-suited to milk, bakery, and parcel deliveries.

Some sources appear to say that the pedal system works the opposite way, where stepping on the pedal stops the truck and letting the pedal out allows it to coast. That’s why the above quote may read a bit confusing. Either way, the Brown-Lipe four-speed transmission’s first gear was low enough that the truck moved at more or less walking speed, which explains the quote above about the truck slowly driving itself to the next house. That way, the delivery driver never needed to get in and drive like today’s letter carriers, but the truck moved itself to the next house like a horse would.

These trucks also had actual bicycle seats. I couldn’t imagine these were particularly comfortable and they were designed so that you could fold them away and control the truck while standing.

The Twin Truck became a staple of bakeries, farms, milk delivery, paper routes, and just about any other type of business that needed to deliver goods from door-to-door. Perhaps the most famous operator of Twin Trucks was the Helms Bakeries, and most of the few survivors you’ll see today either used to be from the bakery or has been restored to look like a Helms truck.

Helms ran from 1931 to 1969, and while it may be long gone, some still think of the company as a legend today. The company’s well-dressed “Helmsmen” made up to 250,000 home-deliveries between the border of Mexico and Fresno. Unlike a typical bakery company today, Helms didn’t deliver to grocery stores, but directly to residences. So, a lot of older folks on the West Coast likely remember these little yellow trucks.

According to the American Truck Historical Society, the weird drive system created a conflict between Twin Coach and its main rival Divco (Detroit Industrial Vehicle Co.), which also created a single pedal clutch and braking system. The two companies settled their differences with a cross-licensing agreement in 1933. Divco would eventually take over the Twin Truck line in 1936, and the trucks would eventually be known as the Divco Twin.

Sadly, most of these trucks lived out lives not much different than transit buses. Twin Trucks were worked hard every single day until they weren’t useful anymore, then they were scrapped. Some of them were saved and they pop up from time to time in auctions.

This 1931 Twin Truck

That leaves us with the 1931 Twin Truck on your screen today. It’s being auctioned off by Mark Net in an auction that still has a bit over four days to go. The auction provides this rather limited description:

Mr. Hart put together a great collection of collector vehicles from the early 1900s to the 60s.  Model T’s, Vintage Firetrucks, unique cars and trucks are just a few highlights in the collection.  Don’t miss out on a chance to own one of these great vintage cars and trucks!

1931 Fageol Twin Coach Van, VIN OR20110. Odometer show 30492 miles. Engine and transmission are in unknown condition. Tire size is 7.00-18, tires hold air for a short while. All glass is present but some of the windows are cracked. Vehicle has some rust and is missing two hubcaps. Selling with title.

The paint scheme on this truck is that of Helms Bakeries, though it’s unclear if the truck has ever delivered for the company. The truck also wears an Oregon license plate and was assigned a new VIN by the state as well.

The little guy rides on a 95-inch wheelbase, stretches out 172 inches, and stands 87-1/4 inches. While not pictured, it should have a little single engine located under the hatch in the front of the cab. From the factory it would have had a 199 cubic inch Hercules four-cylinder engine good for 37.5 HP and designed to handle repeated low speed stop-and-go operations. Later Divco Twin trucks had L-head four-cylinder engines from Detroit-based Continental Motors (which made lots of military engines as well as engines for independent car companies) making an ever so slightly better 38 HP.

These vans were also built to be hardy, with one report claiming that they could last up to 500,000 miles. Other neat bits include the fact that the trucks had an engine idle lever so that the engine could run at a high enough idle to keep its battery charged. The trucks also came with cute air whistles that Helmsmen used to alert locals of an impending delivery.

Ultimately, the Twin Truck/Divco Twin production lasted until just after World War II. However, Helms Bakeries loved the trucks so much that it bought newer Divco trucks and had them modified to look like the Twin Truck.

All of this makes this little truck a pretty cool piece of history, though it might be hard to see that through all of the rough bits. Look past the broken windshield and all of the rust and the probably-limited-parts-availability and I think you have a fantastic platform to build whatever you want. Restomod it into something that could keep up with modern traffic, do a period-correct restoration, or maybe even make it into a cool RV. All I know is that someone should pick this little guy up from its location in Lavonia, Georgia. Bidding is at $10,500 right now, which sounds like a lot for something that doesn’t run. But I’d totally do it if I had that kind of cash.