VINTAGE FDNY RIG PHOTOS.

[68jk09]

Does anyone know the know the information about the "box alarm photograph" of the fire on the Lower East Side, I was a fireman in Tower Ladder 18 at that time, and I think I am in the photograph helping to repack the hosebed. Box number? Date? etc. Also that Is a American LaFrance tractor and the aerial is Metal NOT wood.
Captain Bob Rainey FDNY Engine 26 retired.

The two Chauf School LADs that in am referring to from 1972 were WLF Tractors with '38 Seagrave Wooden Aerial Ladders on the trailer section.

 

[3511]

Does anyone know the know the information about the "box alarm photograph" of the fire on the Lower East Side, I was a fireman in Tower Ladder 18 at that time, and I think I am in the photograph helping to repack the hosebed. Box number? Date? etc. Also that Is a American LaFrance tractor and the aerial is Metal NOT wood.
Captain Bob Rainey FDNY Engine 26 retired.

It is a Ward la France tractor and nobody said that the aerial was wooden. It is obviously metal.

By the early 1970s all the wooden aerials were out of frontline service on the job. These workhorse Ward LaFrance tractors, by then over 20 years old, were still pulling the last vestiges of the wooden aerials and metal aerials from the 1950s as spares or as training rigs, as the Chief indicated.
L38 had one of these tractors from 1947 to 1953 pulling a 1920s era Seagrave trailer. In 1968 L38 was involved in a serious wreck on Southern boulevard and one of these Ward LaFrance tractors came back temporarily to pull the metal trailer as a spare.