This is the mother coach—a vehicle that transformed its industry and lives in the DNA of motorcoaches being built nearly a century later.
The 1922 Fageol Safety Coach was the first large vehicle purpose-built for passenger road travel. Highways had developed sufficiently to make intercity travel possible, but brothers Frank and William Fageol (pronounced “fadjl”) decided that existing buses, mostly built on truck frames, were not good at carrying people. Their parameters for a new vehicle guide the industry today.
“The first requisite for the ultimate motorcoach was the ability to serve best and attract patronage. The yardstick by which the equipment would succeed or fail would be its ability to sell rides, and the requirements for this passenger popularity were safety, comfort, convenience features and dependability, coupled with operating economy,” Frank wrote in a technical paper published by the Society of Automotive Engineers in 1926.
The Safety Coach changed its industry but was built for only a few years before the brothers sold the company. Production information is not available, though some Fageol business records were found at a garage sale decades later and then donated to a university library. It is believed, however, that 2,500 Safety Coaches may have been built in Oakland, Calif., and shipped across North America.
Fewer “than ten are known to exist, and the Museum of Bus Transportation has two, one Transit Coach and one Parlor Coach,” said Angel Tollens, assistant curator at the museum in Hershey, Pa. “There are several reasons why Fageol coaches are important.”
The Safety Coach could seat up to 20 passengers with luggage stored at the back of the cabin.
Water heated by the engine was piped through the passenger compartment for winter warmth. In hot weather, air was circulated through ventilators on the windshield, body sides and roof.
The Fageol’s commissioned a specialized engine that would deliver truck-like torque at highway speeds. The four-cylinder engine produced 62 horsepower and delivered about 13 miles per gallon while pushing the 6,800-pound vehicle. The engine, transmission and drive shaft were isolated from the chassis on fabric and rubber pads.
The coach had an aluminum body and a dropped center frame section so passengers had an easy step into the cabin.
“The floor was twenty-one inches from ground level. The wide track contributed to unrivaled vehicle stability in turns at highway speeds. This bus easily achieved 50 m.p.h. speeds. Safety Coaches were less prone to a roll-over situation,” Tollens said.
“Fageols were the first buses to utilize air brakes. The brakes incorporated a fail-safe design. If air pressure was lost, the brakes would apply automatically.”
The Parlor Coach was a personal conveyance for the well-off customer. It carried wicker seats that could be repositioned and held to the floor by rubber suction cups. All passengers had their own doors.
Fageol built two luxury automobiles before World War I diverted its engine supplier to military production. The brothers then built farm tractors.
When the Safety Coach was introduced, General Motors, White and International Harvester led a number of smaller companies in manufacturing buses or bus bodies that could be installed on truck frames. The Fageol’s thought they could do better, Frank wrote in the SAE paper. “The problem in building the first ‘safety coach’ was to short-cut evolution—to bridge the gap between what the industry had and what it needed. The first motor-stages were adapted from the touring car or the truck . . . both had great shortcomings in public motor passenger service.”
By the end of 1923, Safety Coaches were serving 78 companies in the U.S. One of the surviving Safety Coaches was recently recovered, after decades of outdoor exposure and decay, by the Fountainhead Antique Auto Museum in Fairbanks, Alaska. It had carried tourists into Denali National Park.
The brothers sold Fageol Motors in 1927 and moved to Kent, Ohio, to produce the Twin Coach—a bus fitted with engines at front and rear drive axles so greater passenger loads could be carried. The new company successfully built trucks for many years.
The short-lived Safety Coach and Parlor Coach did pave a highway to the future, as Southern California Fageol distributor H.J. Ruddle told a reporter in 1923. These coaches, he said, “provide a type of motor vehicle with which it is possible to develop the field of long-distance tours without fatigue to the passenger, a factor which has, up to this time, been a stumbling block in furthering motorbus development.”
