For the "sparks" among us: In February 1989, Chan Brainard snapped this photo of a 1920's Seagrave Model K aerial ladder truck with a rear steer feature, on display at the Hall of Flame Museum of fire apparatus in Phoenix, Arizona. Straight-frame tiller trucks were fairly rare due to the fact that coordination between the front and rear drivers was an absolute must. The last ones were manufactured in the early 1930s. New Haven had a couple of these trucks, but a 1937 accident injured several firefighters responding to a call when the tillerman on Truck 4 inadvertently steered the entire rig out of control and it flipped over.
Tractor-trailer tiller aerial trucks, still manufactured, cannot be steered off course by the tillerman, but the direction of a straight-frame rig could be controlled by the operator of either the front or the rear steering wheel.
Posted 7/20/12
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