This is less of a truck and more of a giant red unicorn. What you are looking at is a 1954 Ford F800 4×4 Marmon Herrington Van Pelt Fire Truck. That combination of words is so rare that you will only ever see it once in your life and it would be to describe the only one ever built by the Van Pelt fire truck company. This monster is so cool in so many ways that you really have to watch the video but we’ll give you some of the highlights. For starters, it was incredibly expensive with an out the door price of just under $20,000 in 1954 money which equates to $174,711.94 in today’s world. This one belonged to the town of Twain Harte, California and it is now in the capable hands of OCD restoration, the place that has a collection of rare and cool 1950s 4x4s that is virtually unrivaled on Earth.
So what are the really rare parts of this truck? For starters, the chassis layout. The 12ft wheelbase is very short. F800s were huge trucks in their day and they were typically not riding on this short a wheelbase. It was ordered as a bus with no windshield. Van Pelt added their own when converting the machine. The neatest thing is the Marmon Herrington four wheel drive. As we have beaten into your heads over the years, four wheel drive anything was not common in the 1950s and the conversions were expensive. How expensive? It DOUBLED the price of the truck.
The fire chief in Twain Harte must have had good friends on the city council to sign off on this bad boy. It was the most expensive truck that Van Pelt built in the 1950s, not the model, the specific truck! This video is fantastic and goes into a ton of details, if you love these trucks you’ll really dig this video!
Click on the image below to take a video tour of this amazing truck
Ford F800 Marmon 4×4 Herrington Van Pelt Fire Truck. That’s easy for you to say – can you imagine breaking down miles from anywhere struggling with poor cell phone coverage and trying to tell the local recovery guy what he’s going to be picking up. Still you could light a fire to keep warm as there would be no worries about putting it out when he turned up…