At the start of the Great War, AEC was just a two-year-old company constructing buses for the LGOC. With the help of former rival Daimler, it produced its first purpose-designed lorry, the Y-type, to aid the war effort. Seb Marshall recently rescued this one from dereliction. Zack Stiling brings us the full story on this survivor.
The Associated Engineering Company was barely out of its swaddling clothes when Europe went to war in 1914, but its rise to prominence had been more or less instant, owing to the stature of its parent firm, the Underground Electric Railways Company. The creation of AEC was just the latest in a very convoluted series of dealings in which various competing public-transport operators in London were trying to get the better of one another.
The old-established London General Omnibus Company was among the most prominent operators during the reign of Edward VII, but it briefly fell behind when rival operators began running regular motor-bus services in 1905. The Vanguard fleet had constructed a four-acre factory site for motor-bus construction on Hookers Lane, Walthamstow, which the LGOC acquired when it absorbed Vanguard in 1908. Naturally, LGOC
