THE GOLDEN AGE OF AMERICAN BUSES: 1951-1960. 1951-1960 uring this decade, the nation's best-know

The Dependable Diesel, which told about the introduction of diesel power into various applications. Some bus applications described included Conti-nental Trailways, which tried Cummins diesel engines in two A.C.F.-Brill coaches in 1951. The com-pany was sufficiently satis-fied with the engines, and in 1952 ordered 33 new A.C.F.-Brills with Cum-mins power. Another article started out: One Sunday late in January 1956 was literally the end of the line for 49 streetcars in Dallas, Texas, as 49 new Southern Coach buses took to the street as their replacement. There were many nostalgic memories that went along with the pass-ing of the streetcar. But Dallas gave a farewell party and then welcomed the buses with a mile long downtown parade. All of the new Southerns are powered by 200- horsepower Cummins diesels. I like the feeling of reserve power. No matter which direction we go from Trona, we have to make a pretty steep climb. The Cummins diesel makes all the grades easily, hauling 79 pupils. Another important thing is that we get nine miles per gallon from the fuel, whereas the best of the gasoline-powered buses will get only five miles per gallon. And so we use the diesel-powered bus on all the special trips. In that way I get to see a lot of ball games and attend most of the musi-cal events. I drive for the high school teams, the band, glee club and other groups. Once I took a load of drama students to the Pasadena Playhouse, a round trip of about 300 miles. We didn't have to stop and go to the trouble of refueling. Air suspension systems, A Gillig body on an early 1950s Chevrolet, used in Reno. Gillig Coip.. introduced in 1953, allowed the bus level to remain constant as its passenger load changed. Ken-worth introduced a vehicle called the "Bruck," with a main deck divided into two sections, the front sec-tion for passengers, the rear, for freight.

Potential customers were thought to be railroads who were try-ing to substitute highway for rail service in situations where regulatory bodies would not allow passenger service abandonments. Buses were still subject to economic regulation by both state and federal agencies. In the following para-graph (which spans a few decades) are some excerpts from an article in the 1984 issue of Snake River Echoes In the same issue was an article about a diesel-powered Crown school bus, used in Trona, near Cali-fornia's Death Valley. The school bus driver gave this testimonial: An open touring bus, used at Harpers Ferry. The canvas roof is elevated so people can stand up. The chassis is an early 1950s International. State of West Virginia

about the Teton Stage Lines, in Idaho's Snake River Val-ley, and some of the steps in its expansion. Note that the expansion came about by acquiring other carriers' oper-ating authorities.

In the mid-1940s, Albert Moulton of Driggs, Idaho, bought a small bus and obtained an Idaho Public Utili-ties Commission (PUC) permit to operate between Vic-tor and Idaho Falls. In the late 1940s, Moulton sold the line to Raymond Beckstead, who ran the line for five years, and began making some charter runs. In 1953, the firm was purchased by Wells Grover, who had a school bus fleet but was restricted by the Idaho PUC in his use of school buses for other commercial pur-poses. By buying the Teton Stage Lines he received its permit from the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) to operate charters in three states. In 1958, Greyhound wanted to give up its Idaho Falls-to-Ashton run to Grover because it was unprofitable. Local businesses didn't want to lose the nationally known Greyhound service and went to the regulatory agencies, and were able to block the Greyhound abandonment. In the early 1960s, Grover wanted to expand his charter operations and did this by purchasing the Bear Lake Stage Lines, which had the ICC-given right to char-ter buses to anywhere in the U.S., and by the late 1960s the firm had 30 tour buses.

In the late 1950s, the Houghton Lake, Michi-gan, school district installed AM radios in its school buses with two speakers, one in the front and one in the rear. The local radio station scheduled a morn-ing program called School Bus Stop, which would play records in response to mailed-in requests. Dri-vers said the radios "greatly reduced discipline prob-lems and allowed them to monitor weather condi-tions," according to a historical article in School Bus Fleet.

A 1951 Mack city bus used by San Francisco's municipal transit system. San Francisco was one of Mack's best bus customers in this era. Mack stopped building buses in 1960. Institute of Transportation Studies, University of California

The 1954 Silver Book carried ads for outfitters of school buses. Body builders with ads included the Blue Bird, Carpenter, Hackney Superior, and Wayne firms listed earlier. New listings were from Armbruster and Company, Fort Smith, Arkansas; National Body Mfg. Co., Knightstown, Indiana; Oneida Products Corp., Canastota, New York; Stewart Steel Products, Brooklyn, New York; Thomas Car Works, High Point, North Car-olina; and Ward Body Works, Inc., Scone, Arkansas. That year, Chevrolet offered four school bus chassis wheelbases: 137, 161, 199, and 212 inches. A number of builders offered bodies to fit each, with an additional variant being the distance between rows of seats, which changed the seating capacity. The ad from Armbruster and Co. indicated that they were "builders of automo-bile extensions for over 25 years." Their ads showed Chevrolet sedans and station wagons extended to hold four rows of seats. The U.S. Supreme Court's 1954 decision Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka called for eliminating segregation in public schools. In many cities this meant massive use of busing students away from their neighborhood schools. The idea was to promote racial integration in schools and provide equal educational opportunities to children of all races. In 1955, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery, Alabama, bus to a white man, resulting in a long boycott of the local bus system by Montgomery's blacks. The boycott showed that nonviolent demonstra-tions could be effective. The boycott also placed Martin Luther King Jr. into rational prominence. In 1959, Elvis Presley purchased a Flxible and had it customized for road tours by George Barris, the well-known southern California custom vehicle builder.

This GMC bus was used as a Greyhound "highway traveler" and subsequently was converted to a private coach.

Presley kept the bus until 1967 and often did the dri-ving himself. In 1958, U.S. airlines introduced jet aircraft into their scheduled service. Jets flew nearly twice as fast as propelled aircraft and as a result, the fly time between many cities decreased considerably. Jets also provided a smoother flight, which attracted passengers. This author, who was involved in airline matters before the Civil Aviation Board during this time, recalls witnesses testifying that air travel between specific cities would increase by 30 percent after jet service was introduced. These improvements in airline service increased the competitive advantage over buses and any rail passenger service that still remained. The U.S. Transportation Act of 1958 made it easier for railroads to abandon passenger service,

and the number of passenger trains dropped from 1,448 in 1958 to fewer than 500 a decade later. (These figures are from Robert Fellmeth, The Interstate Commerce Omission[sic]. These abandonments placed pressure on other forms of passenger transportation. During this decade Utica Transit Corp., suffer-ing from declining ridership and revenues, began retiring its gasoline-powered Twin Coaches, and replacing them with used diesel-powered GMs, pur-chased from other properties or leased from compa-nies that specialized in used buses. In Monterey, California, the business of the Bay Rapid Transit Company was also declining, and during this decade it acquired five new GMs (including its first diesels) and two used Twin Coaches. In History of Mack Rail Motor Cars and Loco-motives with Randolph L. Kulp as editor, a report states that as of January 1, 1959, 26 aging Mack pas-senger rail motor cars were still in service on a total of 13 rail properties, including lines in Canada, Cuba, and Colombia. Greyhound had emerged as the nation's primary intercity highway passenger carrier, and the firm and its affiliates operated over 5,000 buses (twice the number that they are operating today). Greyhound began to replace its Silversides with GM Scenicruis-ers. The Scenicruiser had a "vista dome" with higher seats in the rear. General Motors had dominant mar-ket shares of both the intercity and local transit mar-kets. Well into the 1960s, the most prominent buses were the Scenicruiser and GM's various urban transit workhorses. By this time, most new intercity buses were equipped with small lavatories.

By 1960, according to Meier and Hoschek, the intercity bus industry had reduced the number of firms to 1,150, less than half the number a decade earlier. Buses had dropped from 24,420 to 20,970 and revenue passengers to 366 million. Two developments during the decade, reported by Wren and Wren, were signifi-cant to the bus building industry. First, in 1957, in an antitrust action, the government forced Greyhound to break some of its long-standing ties with GM and find other sources for its buses. Secondly, various makes of buses started being imported from both Canada and Europe. In 1956, Continental Trailways began purchas-ing Setra Golden Eagle buses, built by Kassbohrer in Germany. The first order was for 200 units. Silver Eagles were produced shortly thereafter, and they were less lux-urious. A number of bus builders dropped out of the market during the decade, leaving the field open to General Motors. According to the September 1961 issue of Commercial Car Journal, by the 1950s, GM "found itself, embarrassingly, almost in complete control of the bus market." This was also the decade when the interstate high-way system started. Eventually every major city in the nation would be linked with four-lane limited access highways. For freight markets, the interstate highway system nearly doubled the productivity of trucks; it prob-ably had a similar effect on the bus/rail passenger mar-kets. However, any advantages buses enjoyed would also be shared by autos traveling the same routes. APTA estimated that by 1960, local transit buses, whose patronage had been declining steadily since 1948, were boarding about 6.4 billion passen-gers annually. Southern Coach Manufacturing Co. of Evergreen, Alabama, built buses after World War II until about 1961. This is a demonstrator, built in 1954.