William B. Fageol and his brother Frank R. began the Fageol Motors Company in 1916 at a location in Oakland, California. The first vehicle built was the sensational 1917 130 h.p. Fageol Supercar that was an unfortunate causality of World War I. Postwar the Company focused on the impressive Fageol Safety Coach and a line of Fageol trucks.

Louis J. Fageol, Frank’s son, ended up managing the renamed “Twin Coach” Company by himself after his brother Oren died in 1943. In addition to running the business, Louis was a well-known speedboat racer who won the Gold Cup in 1951 with his hydroplane “Slo-Mo-Shun V.” He also constructed racing cars to run at Indianapolis and bought the unfinished Art Sparks coupe built for Joe Thorne, and completed it with one of his own engines and named it the Fageol “Super Sonic.”

Sales of buses at Twin Coach and other bus builders dropped when General Motors began to dominate the market in the late forties. Needing a new product to bring to market in October of 1950 the firm introduced a new concept vehicle the Fageol “Super Freighter.” This unique truck was a self-propelled trailer minus the tractor with the driver’s compartment located up front, and the engine mounted in the middle of the vehicle below the floor.

Exactly who designed this new truck is not known, but Louis J. Fageol filed a patent application for the renamed Fageol “TC CargoLiner” on November 30, 1950. It used an under-floor diesel engine and transmission (seen in the last photo below) that drove through a rear drive axle, both apparently were built by International Harvester.

The demonstrator, fabricated in 1950 as part of an effort to land an Army contract for 1,650 vehicles. The Fruehauf Trailer Corporation constructed the stainless body, and the front of it was mounted on a steerable bogey axle with hydraulicly actuated controls. This front axle assembly is visible in the third photo below.

It appears the effort only resulted in one “Cargoliner” being built, but at about the same time Twin Coach won a contract to build over 1500 F-32-F “Convertible” buses for the US Army. This was followed in 1952 by the production of the Twin Coach “Fageoliner”, a civilian bus. You can learn more about the Fageol Company and the vehicles it produced at Coachbilt.com. The photos are courtesy of the W.B. Fageol Collection.