Gas Bag on Roof Holds Bus Fuel (Apr, 1940)
Filed under: Automotive — @ 10:00 am
Source: Popular Science ( More articles from this issue )
Issue: Apr, 1940
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Source: Popular Science ( More articles from this issue )
Issue: Apr, 1940
| Buy on Ebay
Gas Bag on Roof Holds Bus Fuel
Mounted on the roof tops of English busses, balloonlike fabric bags are serving as reservoirs for coal gas, a fuel now in general use as a substitute for gasoline. In the photograph reproduced above, coal gas is being piped into the roof-top balloon reservoir of a bus before the vehicle starts off on a scheduled run.
Oh yeah, sign me up. I can’t wait to be riding around UNDERNEATH the combustible fuel during the Blitz 5 months later…
Comment by Stannous — October 13, 2007 @ 5:58 pm
This type of thinking worked out well for the Hindenberg.
Comment by Thundercat — October 13, 2007 @ 7:33 pm
Methane?
Lighter than air.
The flames would go up, away from the bus.
I wonder if they set fire to one of the fuel bladders as a test.
Comment by jayessell — October 14, 2007 @ 9:13 am
Not methane – if I remember correctly this was manufactured fuel gas from coal gasification – much carbon monoxide and some hydrogen. This stuff was nasty and rough on the engines it was used in – lots of corrosion from the acids created as combustion by-products.
CO is marginally lighter than air and hydrogen is much lighter. The boom would tend to go up, though I wouldn’t want to be anywhere near it.
Alan
Comment by mrchurchill109 — October 15, 2007 @ 9:24 am
“Producer gas,” I think, is the term. It was used for lighting and cooking in cities for a long time, before natural gas pipelines became common. I’d worry more about a leak into the passenger cabin than an explosion — people used to commit suicide by sticking their head in the oven, because they’d be overcome fairly quickly by the carbon monoxide.
Comment by Orv — October 16, 2007 @ 6:21 pm
Probably filled with coal gas; that is what you get when you heat
up coal and filter out all of the tars and solids from the off gases.
The GrafZepplin was a hydrogen filled dirigible that spent ten years
cross the oceans and round the world. If you want to be afraid of a gas
container, the most dangerous one is a tanker of chlorine or propane….
Comment by Henry Gibson — May 6, 2008 @ 9:23 pm
It certainly was ‘town gas’, manufactured from coal. Private cars and lorries also used this system. Some busses, esspecially double-deckers, towed a small trailer.
Comment by Bill Raisn — September 22, 2008 @ 4:15 am