Photo © Roger Cox. Please do not re-post without permission.

The sole surviving Leyland FEC, FJJ774, with Chiswick built C34C bodywork, better known as Tiger Flat TF77c, is pictured on the A23 south of Crawley during an HCVC Brighton Rally in, I think, 1980.
Unlike the underfloor mid engined saloon designs that became established post war, the FEC had the driving position set high over the front axle, immediately behind which lay the horizontal engine drivng through an air operated preselective transmission. The braking system was also air operated.

The first FECs consisted of a 1937 Leyland bodied prototype to Chiswick bodywork design, followed by twelve production private hire coaches with Park Royal bodies that arrived with the LPTB in the spring of 1939. The 75 chassis for the Green Line network were delivered to the LPTB at the same time, but the completion by Chiswick of the bodywork order for them all took until August of that year.

TF77 went into Green Line services Y1, Y2 and Y3 at Romford in July 1939, but the advent of war saw it and its fellow Green Line TFs withdrawn and converted into ambulances. At the start of the conflict all but two of the entire TF private hire fleet was put into store at Bull Yard, Peckham, where it suffered total destruction by a bomb on 22 October 1940. Only the prototype TF1 and private hire TF9, both of which had been fortuitously moved to Old Kent Road to meet such private hire work as was still obtainable, survived the bomb attack.

At the end of the war the TF and 10T10 fleets, plus a few of the Q type, resumed Green line duties from 1946, but the introduction of the RF from 1952 quickly spelled the end for the pre war saloon survivors. The TF fleet was withdrawn in 1953, TF77 going in July of that year, mercifully into the LT museum collection.

Photo taken by Roger Cox, May 1980, A23, south of Crawley

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