Archival Gems: Century-Old Photos of America’s First Articulated Buses

In a photo-rich article in The Autopian, Mercedes Streeter outlines the history of the articulated bus, a now-common sight in public transit fleets that lets vehicles carry a larger number of passengers while navigating city streets.

According to Streeter, articulated buses go back as far as the 1920s. “America’s first articulated bus, the 1938 Twin Coach Super-Twin was a marvel. This bus, which, weirdly, only articulated in one direction, allowed the city of Baltimore to carry 56 people and was, allegedly, the largest passenger vehicle on the road.”

Some of the earliest incarnations used trailers that separated the vehicles in half. Later, the modern articulated bus design allowed the bus to stay in one piece. The Twin Coach was “likely the first purpose-built city bus of any kind in America,” and the Super-Twin, which ran on a combination diesel-electric engine, was touted as “the largest public transit vehicle that wasn’t a train.” Although it didn’t catch on (perhaps a victim of the times, as the first Super-Twins were built just before World War II) the Super-Twin remains a fascinating blip in transit history, and the precursor to modern articulated buses — ones that bend both ways.