CT electric

Another beautiful day in Tucson, little chilly in the morning but by 10 or 11 o'clock it's T-shirt weather again.

As I was walking around the fairgrounds this morning, sitting off by itself behind a building was this raggedy old antique truck that you see in the first picture. I walked over to it and at first glance certain things didn't make sense, like for instance, where was the engine? But a closer look at the undercarriage solved the riddle, I could see electric motors on each wheel, this was an electric truck!

There's an old saying that goes, "everything old is new again" and this is a good example of that. We make a big deal out of these newfangled electric vehicles and believe were so modern and so smart for coming up with the idea of an electric car, not realizing that people we believe to be tobacco chewing, uneducated, illiterate, grandparents, and great-grandparents came up with the idea over 100 years ago. And all we did was improve the concept.

Now I don't know the first thing about electric vehicles especially one as old as this because it looks like somebody unhitched the horses from a wagon, put electric motors on the wheels, and drove away. In other words it looks closer to a buckboard that a vehicle. But I am curious about such things and realizing that the Internet can be your friend in matters like this, I Googled it up.

Since antique electric trucks aren't all that common it didn't take much research to find out all about this truck. I found out it was made in 1916 and is a 5 ton electric truck made by the CT company in Philadelphia PA, and the CT stands for "Commercial Truck ". It has a top speed of a thundering 12 mph, which is probably as fast as anybody had the nerve to drive the thing. It was used for various purposes, but a common purpose and the one this truck was used for was the delivery of papers and periodicals by the Curtis publishing company in Philadelphia. This being one of the 22 trucks that they used.

Yes it's ugly, and driving down a bumpy street with its solid rubber tires must of been a painful experience. But to me it's a very interesting vehicle and surely has a heck of a story to tell about how and why it got from delivering papers in Philadelphia to sitting in a fairgrounds in Tucson Arizona.

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Here you can see the electric motors on the rear wheels. All four wheels have their own motor.

The trucks battery bank has been removed from the underside racks where it would normally be and set in the bed of the truck. Doing that must've been a major project.

This is a CT electric truck in a museum that's been somewhat restored. I borrowed these last two pictures off the Internet.

This CT electric truck has the optional cab for sissies that can't handle rain and snow on their 12 hour shift.