Vintage shots from days gone by!

Although I never saw it in action, the LAFD did have a fuel tanker truck for refuling apparatus (pumpers typically) in the field at large fires.

As far as the V12 engines, both American LaFrance and Seagrave manufatured their own gasoline V12 engines. This eventually led the LAFD to remove ALF from recieveing bids for new LAFD apparatus for many years. LAFD's bids in the late 1960's up until they went with diesel engines required that all new apparatus be equipped with Hall Scott straight-6 gasoline engines. These were huge displacement engines and were very reliable. ALF refused to use them, they wanted to only install their own engines. Seagrave also refused at first, but finally agreed to use the Hall Scott engines. Mack was another fire engine company that only wanted to install their own engines, and to my knowledge, the LAFD never ordered another Mack fire engine after the 1960's. The City of Los Angeles is 500 square miles in size, and more than 25% of it is in the foothills. Apparently, nothing climbed those hills better than the Hall Scott engines.

Eventually, the LAFD went almost exclusively with a local Los Angeles company called Crown Fire Coach, a company that had been building busses since the horse drawn days. The Crown Fire Coach was not only an advance design, they were located in downtown L.A. (no shipping charge), offered completely customized equipment, and would install anything (engines, pumps, etc.) that the LAFD wanted. They started ordering from Crown in 1953 in small quantities until eventually, the Department was almost completely Crown equipped.

This is a 1954 Crown. Shorter wheelbase (important for the Hollywood Hills) and seating for a 4-man crew with nobody on the tailboard.


Here is a photo of the Pumper/Hose Wagon combination built for the LAFD by Crown Fire Coach in the early 1960's. The Hose Wagon is almost exactly the same design only more compact than the old ones, and the Pumper had only a single pump, but it was 3000 Gal/minute, which duplicated what the old Duplex Pumpers could put out, and it could also be used as a normal triple combination fire engine (it had a water tank, ladders, and carried hose).

 

None of these photos are new stuff. These rigs were all manufactured in the early to mid 1960's and were still in use in the 1990's. Crown became the one-stop shop for the LAFD. Any specs the department wanted, Crown built it to those specs.

 

Now that's a cherry picker!

 

Goo d day for Wood Lites

 

My gramps was a bus driver, he started in 1926 with Southern Kansas Stage and Freight based out of Wichita it then became Santa Fe Trailways, and then Continental Trailways.


I'm not sure what year it was but below are some photos he took when he was sent back east to drive one of two new busses back to Wichita, he hauled freight between Wichita and Kansas City, when he switched to the bus side the main routes he drove were Wichita to Pueblo Colorado, Wichita to Oklahoma City, Wichita to Texarkana.

 

Like most fire departments, the LAFD did not start out with state of the art equipment.

Since the LAFD was founded in the late 1800's, everything in the beginning was powered by horses, including this Water Tower.


At some point after the turn of the Century, it was modified in the department shops to eliminate the hay eaters.


It was modified yet again in the late 1930's, using an old trailer from a ladder truck and a 1938 ALF tractor. These water towers never proved to be that effective. They put so much water into the upper floors of an 8 to 10 story building that the floors collapsed because of the weight of the water. Water weighs 8.36 pounds per gallon, so 2,000 gallons a minute of water adds 1,672 pounds on the floors per minute, times 10 minutes, can add over 8 tons of water.

 

Because of the nice weather in L.A., open cabs and open tillers were the norm on LAFD fire apparatus. All that changed after the Watts Riots in 1965. Rocks and bottles rained down on the firemen responding to the blazes during the riots in Watts. From that point on, all new apparatus specs required closed cabs and closed tillers. This is a Seagrave aerial ladder truck, one of the first fire apparatus manufacturing companies to use steel aerial ladders. Seagrave did very well with the LAFD, and while the majority of fire engines were manufactured by Crown from the middle 1950's on (until they went out of business in 1991), the majority of ladder trucks were manufactured by Seagrave, which is still in business today, and is the primary fire apparatus supplier to the FDNY.