A recent perusing of the ATHS Forums’ popular What Am I section turned up the above shot of one of 60 so-called “trailer coaches” that Greyhound fielded for the 1933-1934 Chicago Century of Progress World’s Fair, courtesy the New York Public Library’s collection. We immediately thought of searching through the University of Illinois’s photo archives, on which we recently found another Century of Progress-related photo, the one of the Terraplane setting out on its Ruggedness Run, and on which we found two more Greyhound trailer coach shots.
According to the What Am I thread, GMC built these trucks for Greyhound (the badges on the hoods read “General Motors Truck”) on the T26 chassis using unique sheetmetal. Captions on the photos noted that the trailer coaches were the only motorized transport allowed on the grounds of the fair, and that they carried more than 20 million attendees throughout that time.
So what happened to those 60 after the fair? Nobody seems to know, though one possibility is that they were sold off and repurposed as delivery trucks, as we see from this shot of a Hydrox ice cream truck from a subsequent What Am I thread. Then again, converting a tractor into a long-wheelbase delivery van is no simple task, so the ice cream truck could have nothing directly to do with the Greyhound trailer coaches. Anybody out there know the whole story?