Why Does This Truck Need TWO ENGINES? | The STRANGEST Trucks Ever Built
Dec 25, 2025
Within the vast and very rich history of the heavy automotive industry, there have been numerous concepts, prototypes, and seemingly innovative ideas that have emerged with the intention of solving a need or simply saving companies from financial difficulties. Whatever their motive, these prototypes have gone down in the history of heavy transport both for their peculiar context and for their striking designs and proposals. That is why today we will talk about some of the strangest and most surprising trucks ever manufactured.
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The two-engine thingy is the bad idea that just won't die. Where two or more engines are used - aircraft, ships/boats, railroad - it's to provide redundancy. You lose your single engine over the ocean, there's no question how it ends. You are in a pleasure skiff in open ocean and one of your outboards dies, well, you're essentially in a lifeboat, adrift. Without supplies.
Railroads - until very recently - always ran locomotives in pairs. Even on a short turn train taking eight cars to a local industry. Becuz...what if one of those 30-year-old EMD units, does what 30-year-old, poorly-maintained, pieces of equipment...tend to do. With one dead engine, you're still going. In fact it's often the practice to turn one of them off.
But with just one...when it fails, you stop. Which, with Old-School railroad management, was bad news. Today, however...seems most traffic managers just don't care. It'll get there when it gets there.
As to those trucks and buses...all it does is add to fuel use. They left off the most-famous twin-engine unit - the Greyhound Scenicruiser. It had two Detroit Diesel engines tied to Dynaflow transmissions (Buick make; no gears, just a torque converter) each engine driving one of the rear wheel sets.
It was such a maintenance headache that Greyhound, at great expense and after a legal fight with GMC Coach, who made those things...after that, they paid Marmon (a specialty truck maker of the time) to refit the buses with a conventional rear-engine driveline. That was the end of dual bus engines, and that was the last GMC Coach that Greyhound bought.
Most people interested in buses know of MCI coaches, but few know that Greyhound started the company as their in-house coach builder. They intended to build a better bus, and did - after a few years, Canadian charter companies wanted to buy them, and then non-Greyhound lines, like Trailways. With the complex reorganization of Greyhound Lines into a conglomerate, and then its dismantling and sale of parts...MCI was sold as an independent company, and now is owned by Mexican maker DINA.