In the 1960s, automakers promised to propel us all long-term with turbines. The big three have ready prototypes of cars and trucks with positive reaction thrusters, and some have entered the public’s hands for testing. Chrysler’s well-known Turbine Car attracts all the attention; Less well-known are Ford and GM’s competing efforts to build a turbine semitrailer. Both corporations proudly brought concepts in 1964, but both temporarily disappeared once the generation proved unworkable in the genuine world.
Like many concepts, GM machines were probably destroyed, so we learned looking to continue this story. But Ford’s futuristic van, known as Big Red, escaped the shredder out of sheer possibility and disappeared into the air. It’s been lost for decades, or as the story goes. No one knows who caught him, where he ended up, or if he survives today.
But I have news for you: Big Red still exists. And I know where he is.
To succeed in this conclusion, it took months of excavations, looking for a dark rabbit hole on the internet afterwards and many dead ends. That’s how I got hit there.
Ford’s missing monster designed under the watchful eye of automotive engineer Roy Lunn: the Ford GT40, the mustang I concept of central engine, the XJ Jeep Cherokee and more. The so-called Big Red suitable for a red semitrailer 96 feet long and thirteen feet high. Its turbine engine, called 705, evolved internally through Ford and produces six hundred horsepower and 855 pound-feet of torque.
The interior is a mid-century dream with full kitchen, bathroom with tea incinerator, tv for co-pilots and panoramic view of the road. It’s Ford’s commitment to the long-term trucks and glittering roads of the United States. And even though the turbine didn’t work, Big Red advanced in the game by predicting several features that truckers now take for granted, such as flat cab floors, air suspension, suspended cabs, and redundant braking systems.
Both Ford and General Motors have manufactured turbine semi-trailers, any of which is functional and has been very well tested. If you are more interested in the main technical points of those machines or GM’s efforts, you can read our main article on trucks here.
Big Red’s great revelation took place along the Ford Mustang at the 1964 World’s Fair in New York, after which Ford organized a promotional bombing across the country with stops in major cities to show other people tomorrow’s truck. However, due to technological unrest, basically the large thirst for turbines and low-emission functionality, advertising turbine trucks never went past the prototype stage, and Big Red was no different. This left the concept platform as a dead guy at the end of his national excursion in 1965.
Then came the destination, because Big Red discovered a savior at Holman Moody, the race team sponsored through the Ford factory. The details of his exhaust from the shredder are unclear: at least one alleged eyewitness claims he parked at a Ford facility in Michigan for a few years in the 1960s before Holman Moody bought the tractor. (We will communicate about the fate of the trailers in a moment).
The sources I spoke to, which we will hear later at hitale, have also repeated a story that, reportedly, transmitted through John Holman’s son, Lee Holman, that Big Red was transported to the southeast when the transport platform broke and Holman Moody helped pass. tow him back to his Charlotte headquarters. Ford never picked it up.
Whatever the royal road, Big Red landed at The Holman Moody’s Storage Hangar adjacent to Charlotte-Douglas International Airport, where it remained until 1978. Nor is it debated that Ford retained the original turbine engine, which was replaced by a V8, but that it is precisely unclear blocks. You can see it parked in the shed in a photo here, which was taken in the early 1970s (see the fascia of the Visual Mustang 69 only Big Red).
Although the big red decade and more in Holman Moody is only documented in a few photographs, it turns out that this has not moved much, there is at least tangible evidence of what happened next. In 1978, John Holman’s son, Lee, took over the company, which had experienced difficulties in the 1970s after the end of his partnership with Ford.
One of his first acts was to empty the shed with a giant stock sale, promoted as the ‘Holman Sale – Moody House cleaning everything must go to the courtyard of the century’. An ad in a sales magazine presented here showed Big Red stationed in a pile of V8 racing and elsewhere, and Holman Moody also published a full catalog to market the acts that highlighted Big Red as a valuable item for an interested collector.
Then, as an engine surplus, Big Red was sold to an anonymous buyer. After that, it’s dust in the wind. The road ends. Two things, and only two, happen in the famous concept cars: they are tragically destroyed or stored to be held in places like Pebble Beach and Goodwood decades later. Fully functional prototypes don’t just disappear. But Big Red did.
I will be frank and admit that it does not result that there is virtually any express data concerning the existing location of the truck. But circumstantial evidence? The Drive has amassed a mountain in hard-to-understand forums, social media posts and probably random comments on YouTube and Flickr, and all indications are that Big Red has survived to this day in North Carolina, without having left the state at all, hidden in a collector’s secret garage.
I contacted Holman Moody and Ford for any further confirmation or important points about my findings, but none of the companies responded. You’ll have me here a little bit because chronology isn’t the cleanest thing in the world. But I think it’s the ultimate tale of Big Red’s existing location, an automotive mystery that hasn’t been solved in decades.
First, I had to find out who bought the truck from Holman Moody. Where to start a great query mark.
The only data I had, from an unverified message in the forum, was that the client was also a Thunderbird collector. I also learned that Fruehauf’s trailers had been sold to a professional seaplane team called Bardahl Autolite Racing, after assembling this photo of a repainting with his 1968 livery. Note the aluminum ribs on the side, the decreasing valence skirts and the rear of the shaft clearly spaced.
One of the Big Red trailers repainted with his new livele.
Bardahl Autolite Racing, owned by Seattle millionaire Ole Bardahl, whose eponymous oil and fuel additive company still exists today. Unfortunately, it may not succeed with anyone there who can communicate what happened to the trailer after the team ceased operations at the end of the 1968 season. They may rust somewhere in a box, but chances are they were sold and worked until the end of their useful life, when they were recycled.
Since trailers are seen as sets when they are divorced from the Big Red cabin, it is not at all unexpected that they have been lost in history.
When I started looking for the tractor, that transparent surface search would only take me to the same image galleries, old stories, and curious forum messages that make up Big Red’s existing global online information. So I did more research and, despite his reputation as one of the worst Internet ads, the YouTube comment segment of all the ads revealed something incredible: a guy who claimed to not only know the owner of Big Red, a mysterious “Mr. Richardson” But I’ve noticed it and driven the truck since it disappeared.
“When Holman Moody closed, Big Red sold at auction. Mr. Richardson at Greensboro bought Big Red with several other items … Big Red has been restored and remains in the personal collection your child helps maintain today. Mr. Richardson once allowed me to take Big Red to the neighborhood. With him in the passenger seat, of course.”
I contacted this mysterious commentator without delay, who agreed to speak to me on condition of anonymity. Your call became blurry in the screenshot above; I’ll call him “Dan” from here.
Dan is a truck driving force and a many-year-old mechanic whose parents were friends with Mr. Richardson, and it was through this family connection circle that he was able to get close to Big Red in the early 1980s. He said he was delivering a load of fabrics to the owner’s assets to build a new garage when he learned that the design would space out the vehicle mentioned, which had been painted blue and white at one point during his stay at Holman Moody.
Feeling generous and enjoying Dan’s experience in the truck, Mr. Richardson let him look, get on board and drive down the road.
“I drove the tractor only, they had never had trailers, for a few miles in the neighborhood. At the time, it worked with a VT-903 Cummings [V8],” Dan told me. “They were residential streets and there was no label on the tractor. I drove very thoroughly as he and I discussed what the fuel turbine looks like.”
“The van looked a lot like the Ford cabover manufactured just before Ford stopped the production of Class 8 pickup trucks, which the ground was flat, the cabin was 102 inches wide and I think thirteen feet up with lots of whistles and bells I never played with. Array “
However, Dan refused to give me additional information about Mr. Richardson’s identity, the location of the garage he helped build more than 3 decades ago or any other important point about his existing property, saying he knows the family circle must remain. unnamed to avoid misplaced attention. “I haven’t noticed homeowners in years, but I know they’re incredibly paranoid about other people finding the big red location.” However, he showed up to touch them and see if they were interested in talking.
Could it be so simple? Of course not. After a few days, Dan told me that he had learned that the Richardsons had moved out of their previous location in the last decade and that he was having trouble getting in touch with them. “My friend and I are looking to locate them, but since the youngest is 64, it’s hard to say where they might be or what form they’ll have,” he said.
Another sadness he learned is that his statement in YouTube’s comment that Mr. Richardson is retrieving Ford’s original turbine engine is incorrect. However, when requesting information, he saw another sighting of a friend who had noticed the truck in the 1990s and showed that he was still in good condition, at the time provided with a “kind of multi-fuel engine”.
A promising track has been extinguished. Given Dan’s reluctance to provide evidence of verification, he will be forgiven for having some skepticism here.
But it turns out there are others with stories of close encounters. Like “Tim,” a guy who claims to have briefly helped in the mid-1980s to the Big Red recovery that Dan talked about, and Tim has a lot of express wisdom to back that up.
I discovered Tim (again, not his genuine name) through a random message on a Mack Truck forum dated January 19, where he dropped some key points on Big Red that he had never noticed before. Other than that, it is essentially invisible online, so it took a while to locate it. But when I found out all the way out, what I had to say convinced me even more that Big Red is still there because it independently corroborated the main points of Dan’s account that hadn’t been shared publicly before.
Basically, around 1985, the van taken to a workshop where two of Tim’s friends worked to be completely stripped naked and repainted in their original colors; a blue and white scheme for a van called Big Red simply wouldn’t be enough for Richardson. Layers of paint were removed, components were removed from the frame, but its homeless nature made the procedure not easy. Tim had a lot to say about the restoration, which was basically done through his friends.
“They disassembled and made the bodywork, [returning] it to the original colors by sanding the paint one layer at a time. It had been painted several times since Ford used it. Because of the way it was assembled, some giant pieces not to be disposed of, the large striatum-looking pieces were one, they could not locate any loop and they weren’t going to spoil them,” he said. “The fiberglass is very, very thick, an inch in some places. All heavy. Sanding took a long time and didn’t damage unpainted objects.”
“My two friends and the owner did all the work, I just growled a few times. My frifinish tells how you can succeed and rotate the turbine shaft finish effortlessly. Most of the total interior was there and finished. The stairs worked, the doors opened and he ran and moved.
In addition, Tim independently showed the key highlights of Dan’s story: that Big Red no longer had the original turbine, that the truck had been painted blue and white, that the owner had recently moved and that he literally didn’t know anyone where he was. Tim didn’t want to identify him or verify that Mr. Richardson was the right name, and his friend who oversaw Big Red’s recovery refused to talk to me completely. But I was getting closer.
“We tried to convince the owner to take it to the [American Truck Historical Society] exhibition several times, but not for long. He moved out, but they told me he still has it,” Tim said. “I hope one day we can see him again. At the time, we didn’t have any other mobile phones other than the monstrous bag phones, and he would have shot us anyway if we had taken a picture. I suppose when it’s past, it will come as the return of the Bullitt Mustang.”
“The owner pressured them to get them out at the time, he didn’t need anyone to know anything,” he added. “I’ve been told that it’s much worse now, yet you’ll have to be up there in old age. He’s got a circle of relatives, but he doesn’t even need them.
It was starting to be a chorus and it made sense. If a thing as big as Big Red is going to hide, then someone sought it to be like that. It takes a very paranoid guard to stay that way. Surely there’s no identifiable record of Mr. Richardson on the Internet, is there?
You’d think not to, so it’s very unexpected to find a forum message through someone claiming to be the owner.
“I’m surprised by the interest in Big Red and the turbine program. Yes, Big Red still exists. It was bought from Holguy-Moody years ago but not through Ford. The van had been repainted in a shade of red that was not flattering,” one guy wrote in bigmacktrucks.com in 2013 under the screen called John Eugene Richards.
“A lot of time and money was spent putting the original colors back in the truck. The two 40-foot Fruehauf trailers have not been located, I own the truck that passed between the trailers that was also manufactured through Fruehauf.”
“The shots you see with the elegant front are old photos,” he said. “Engineers learned early about the build-up of heat under the cab in slow movements for long periods of time. The additional opening of the grid solved the problem.
An evocative signed “Big Red Owner”, the comment was posted on some other thread of the same Mack Truck forum where I discovered Tim. But that call! John Eugene Richards. Richards? Richardson? My source, Dan, didn’t you forget the call after all these years? Was the “one” accidentally cut or was it an unsurpassed attempt to disguise his identity? The latter seemed unlikely because, you know, he made a first call and an intermediate. And what were the chances of this adjusting to the last call Dan discussed at first whether it was an invention? Was it my boy?
“Richards” released two other brief responses that day, saying that a Ford 707 fuel turbine engine had been replaced at some point – could he be dan’s friend of “multi-fuel engine” and others discussed above? – and that Big Red remains in good condition.
I felt like I was reading something written through a ghost. After stumbling into the dark for so long with only weak and smooth problems in the distance, here is, in spite of everything, a solid and forged track that may serve as an advisor to Big Red. All I had to do was hit him.
And that’s what I did, to another dead end. John Eugene Richards has never posted on this site despite dozens of responses from other users asking for more data over the more than seven years. An audit of your account shows that you last logged in on February 13, 2019, meaning you saw those desperate calls and never deigned to answer them.
Search elsewhere for your entire call and variants proved useless. Believe it or not, there are many John Richardsons in North Carolina, including several John Eugene Richardson, and I have not publicly discovered any online data pointing to any of them in particular.
Of course, it would be less difficult if I could spend weeks going through the state checking paper records and knocking on the door of older people, but unfortunately this is the world we live in now.
Something else haunted me too. Dan and Tim had been willing to communicate about the owner’s excessive insistence on keeping it a secret. Perhaps it is widespread that even one call is not enough to locate him. Maybe he had his reasons for it. But still, why would he go to a random big forum in 2013 after all those years, when he was probably 80 or 90 at least to randomly announce his world award?
Given the developing chronology and this sudden explosion of advertising, I began to think that John Eugene Richards/Richardson was not really the same Mr. Richardson who had bought Big Red from Holguy Moody in the 1970s. Maybe the older guy hadn’t become dignified or died sometime in the decade that year and left Big Red to some other member of the family circle. After all, Dan said at the beginning of the search that Big Red has lately lived in the original buyer’s son’s collection. Perhaps the poster of our mysterious forum was this lucky son.
It seemed like a natural hypothesis until I searched for another promising track from this Mack Truck forum: a random comment on a 2014 Flickr post from someone who claimed that his brother owned Big Red and that “goes [sic]”.
“I know where he is….. and he’s alive and kicking [sic] in my father’s garage … my brother is the owner of itArray … it is now fully restored with the original fuel turbine engine.”
This Flickr user belongs to a profile with a genuine call: a Thomas Richardson. The user call also corresponds to an inactive Twitter account whose demo call is Thomas Richardson, and whose incredibly limited activity (I’m talking about five tweets, 4 likes in total) includes liking a Carolina-like tweet.
However, enough research. Your email is creepy in the comment.
Unfortunately, unsurprisingly, I sent several messages to this email and haven’t heard anything since. Thomas B. Richardson is simply difficult to refine in the search for public documents online, and I still have to locate forged links linking him to John, such as the obituary of an elder of Richardson with the two men indexed as surviving members of the circle of relatives.
Despite my inability to touch him or determine his alleged relationship with the owner, Thomas Richardson’s claims appear to be legitimate. It is a coincidence that his comments and those of John Eugene Richard were published at about the same time in 2013 or 2014 after decades of silence on the subject.
Moreover, despite his supposedly erroneous claim that the original turbine was back in the truck, this continues with John’s that there are still some other turbines.
So where’s Big Red? I have another marvel for you: at the end of my reporting process, a source, despite everything, went on to the north Carolina call, the city where they believe the Richardsons had moved. I was able to verify that with a source at the moment and, of course, discovered recent asset records involving an imaginable location where Big Red could stay.
But there is still no definitive evidence, because I am still in favor of public archives and databases to consult to get in touch with the smart Richardson. It is a long procedure that can be shortened by publishing this story, assuming it refreshes the proper memory. If so, I’ll be the first to verify that Big Red still exists.
However, all of those are illustrated speculations based on rumors, and even if you were sure, it would still reveal your hiding place without the owner’s permission. So officially, Big Red is still missing. Even though all the evidence I’ve unearthed indicates that he survives today.
The last update I discovered related to the status of the truck was, rightly, some other comment on YouTube. A user named MsBode123 claimed to have been in the truck just a few years ago and spent a few hours looking for him. The username user obviously lives in North Carolina because of his activity on YouTube, which would not constitute evidence in court. But that’s something, isn’t it?
As frustrating as it can be a useless hunt, that’s not what bothers me. No, what bothers me the most is that the owner is sitting with Big Red in his garage, a few meters from him for years, and at most no one has noticed him. Frankly, I’m not even interested in the guy’s full name, where he lives, or why he hid it for so long.
All that I, the young adults who saw him at the World’s Fair and countless other people online, need to know is: how’s it going? What condition are you in? It’s an invaluable piece of American history. It’s a vision of our automotive past. We all just need to know more about it, see it once back in the metal.
It would probably be in bad taste to quote Indiana Jones and say he belongs to a museum, but he does. Why don’t we let the world see this? I just don’t get it.
So that’s where the story ends, for now. All we can do is expect the owner to replace their brain to keep this priceless device locked up. It would be great to see it before everyone forgets what it was, the other people who built it and why it’s so important.
Someday, other people will avoid asking about it.
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