Bloomington FIre Department history … 1928 Ahrens-Fox N-S-4

former Bloomington IL Fire Department 1928 Ahrens Fox fire engine

Betsy Hansen photo

Bob McMahon, a retired University of Southern Maine economics professor living in the Villages, Fla., talks about his 1928 Ahrens-Fox N-S-4 fire truck.

Betsy Hansen photo

When my wife, Linda, and I retired some years ago, we joined the volunteer fire department in Pownal, Maine. That’s when I got into old firetrucks. I have always loved mechanical things. At one time, I owned a 65-foot steam tugboat. I collected old sawmill machinery for a while, and my wife and I once had five firetrucks. The 1928 Ahrens-Fox, built in Cincinnati, Ohio, is the last of those, and the best.

I got this one in 2004. Andy Swift, who owns Firefly Restoration in Maine does museum-quality firetruck restorations. I dealt with him on another truck, and one day he called me and said, “I got this truck you should have.” He specializes in Ahrens-Fox trucks, and for some reason he did not want to tackle this project. The truck was missing a lot of parts and it wasn’t running. I bought it, poked at it for a while, and when we moved to Florida, I had it shipped here so I could continue working on it.

Over the years, some 30 different people helped me restore this truck. It is not terribly expensive entertainment because I did most of the work myself, and I can eventually sell it. Today, it runs beautifully and it pumps water. It is an amazing machine. There are really two kinds of old firetrucks, the kind that carry a lot of water because they were intended for rural areas where there were no hydrants, and trucks used in cities and towns that could connect to hydrants. This one is a city truck. It has a four-piston pump cast out of bronze—a beautiful casting—and it was built to pump a thousand gallons a minute.

Ahrens-Fox also built their own engines. This one has a 998 cubic inch six-cylinder, with pistons as big as coffee cans. The engine has huge torque, but I think the truck only gets about 4 miles per gallon.

I was able to ascertain that this was originally owned by the fire department in Bloomington, IL who had it for 30 years. I have driven it in parades, and twice it won the Best In Show award at the Florida Antique Bucket Brigade firetruck.

This entry was posted on January 25, 2021, 8:00 PM and is filed under Fire Department History, Historic fire apparatus. You can follow any responses to this entry through RSS 2.0. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

#1 by crabbymilton on January 26, 2021 - 6:39 AM

Interesting. Those AHRENS-FOX pumpers look like no other.
Can always play the what if game and think what if AHRENS-FOX had not gone out of business. They had some nice looking apparatus toward the end. MACK acquired the design of the cab forward in the 1950’s. The AHRENS-FOX name has been part of HME for many years though it’s unclear if HME is still active. Their website hasn’t been updated for a while.