Oh NO! There is a BUS Museum out there in PA. Do we now have to contend with Busfans for museum $$$

[Anonymous]

QUOTE: Originally posted by AntonioFP45

PULEASE!

This is good!

Sorry guys, but I worked on buses for 15 years. They do provide an essential service in our economy.

My "all time" favorite transit coaches are the GMC "Fishbowl" series. (Same type of bus you see in the movie SPEED. Introduced in 1959, these buses ran for years and are built tough! They're still running in Canada! They broke down less frequently than their replacements, the GMC RTS series.

My favorite "long distance" bus is the MCI MC-9. Also a well built coach. MCI and Eagle were dominant in the U.S.A for so many years. Now Europeon coaches are becoming the preferred choice for many charter bus companies. (sigh!) For those of you old enough to remember the 1970s, Greyhound preferred MCI coaches while Trailways used Eagles.

Believe it or not, there are a lot of bus fans out there! There seem to be just as many bus forums as train forums.

I'm primarily a model railroader/railfan but to me I like ALL transportation modes and enjoy having model samples of the non-railroad stuff.

Be flexible and do a little exploring of other transportation modes. LIke railroads they all have their unique problems too.

Antonio,
Do you remember the Trailways "Golden Eagle" articulated with the lounge in the back. All reserved seats I believe.
Mitch

[spbed]

Buses in my opinion provide services that RRs do not. [:D]

QUOTE: Originally posted by Dunkirkeriestation

There is the Polka Museum in Euclid OH...
Dont you guys get it! The Buses killed and Murdered the Trolleys! And now they want to have museum and contend for grants! What is next Bustown! instead of steamtown!

[AntonioFP45]

QUOTE: Originally posted by Modelcar

Describe just a bit more what identifies the GMC "Fishbowl" series unit....

Allright, amigo.[:D][;)]
Just click on the link that Dunkkirk provided above. Here it is: http://www.busmuseum.org/

Then click to go to the 2nd page. Scroll down to the picture of all of the miniature buses that are on display. Click on the photo to enlarge it. Now, look at the bright yellow and orange bus in the center (what a beauty![:I]). That's a GMC Fishbowl.

To the good guys here that don't like buses..................O.K! Yes, GM helped wipe out the trolleys with buses, but guys, this same argument can be made that diesel locomotives helped wipe steamers off of mainlines! How many of you like diesel locomotives? Yep, the majority of us.

As a modeler, I plan on having fishbowl buses on my layout which will be set in the late 1960s.

For me, buses bring fond memories because as a kid in New York City, my dad took the car to work. My mom had to do her shopping, our doctor's appointments, etc. So the subway and bus was the way to get around.

[AntonioFP45]

QUOTE: Originally posted by artmark

Antonio,
Do you remember the Trailways "Golden Eagle" articulated with the lounge in the back. All reserved seats I believe.
Mitch

Hi MItch,

Sorry, I don't recall that unit. Might trigger my rusty memory if I saw a picture. The Eagle that I remember seeing as a kid was the O-1, used by Trailways.

Re: The fishbowls (and the Flxible "New Look") that object that looks like a spoiler on the rear roof of those buses housed the condenser fan motor. Early fishbowls had them under the buses and were a pain for mechanics due to grime build up.

Cheers!

[Anonymous]

QUOTE: Originally posted by AntonioFP45

QUOTE: Originally posted by artmark

Antonio,
Do you remember the Trailways "Golden Eagle" articulated with the lounge in the back. All reserved seats I believe.
Mitch

Hi MItch,

Sorry, I don't recall that unit. Might trigger my rusty memory if I saw a picture. The Eagle that I remember seeing as a kid was the O-1, used by Trailways.

Re: The fishbowls (and the Flxible "New Look") that object that looks like a spoiler on the rear roof of those buses housed the condenser fan motor. Early fishbowls had them under the buses and were a pain for mechanics due to grime build up.

Cheers!

Antonio

They were made mid-fifties. The sides were gold instead of silver. I believe made in Europe. Ran on express schedules New York to LA via St Louis. All reserved seats. Small lounge and bar in the rear with stewardess. If you google up Golden Eagle you can find a link. They came in non-articulated single units as well.

Mitch

[tree68]

Pay a visit to the Virginia Museum of Transportation (Roanoke) and see buses and trains for one low admission fee. Same is true at the New York Transportation Museum (south of Rochester). The Henry Ford (Museum - Dearborn, Michigan) celebrates cars, buses and trains under one roof.

The Lone Haranguer rides again.

[Anonymous]

The Georgia State Railroad Museum in Duluth, Georgia (just outside Atlanta) has a section that's dedicated to busses that ran in Atlanta. Most of the busses were donated by MARTA (Metro Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority) so it didn't cost the museum anything, just space.

They don't have any trolleys, though... but they DO have a glorious E7 done in Southern "Crescent" colors.

My wife enjoyed the busses as much as the locomotives and the passenger cars on display, because she spent a great deal of her life riding the busses from home to school and back. More to the point, the busses are open for the public to wander into and sit down in... as compared to the locomotives, which are all closed to the public above ground level.

Erik

[jeaton]

Rule modification from Bergie? No religion, politics or BUSES. (Caps denote change). Oh never mind, we can l leave room for here for the rubber on concrete fans. They sure don't have much room on the streets and highways.

Jay

[chad thomas]

QUOTE: Originally posted by mloik

QUOTE: Originally posted by chad thomas

The "fishbowls" are still used in Santa Monica,Ca. after all these years.

Hey Chad,

Do you know if they still charge $0.25 for a ride? I used to ride them daily when I lived in West LA in the late 80's and early 90's. I could get from home to UCLA, or to LAX, for twenty-five cents...what a deal. There was one driver named Wally who used to serenade the riders over the audio system...

I have no idea. I never rode one. I just know the last time I was there they were still there too.

Whenever I'm watching a movie or tv show and see one it's a tip off for where it was filmed. Then if I pay close attention I can usually recognize the exact location. I was head tech for Century cable in Santa Monica from 90' to 95'.

[AntonioFP45]

QUOTE: Originally posted by erikthered

The Georgia State Railroad Museum in Duluth, Georgia (just outside Atlanta) ..........
They don't have any trolleys, though... but they DO have a glorious E7 done in Southern "Crescent" colors.

Erik

Hi Eric,

How I WI***hat were an E7, as all but one are extinct.

I think you saw Southern Railway #6901. She's one of two E8s still in existence that pulled the Southern Crescent until Southern ceased passenger service in 1979. Wonderful restoration job!

I plan on doing an HO scale model of her.

There are some beautiful shots of her in http://www.railpictures.net

[Anonymous]

Mot quite on subject, Antonio, but you are probably right about the E8. And PROTO put out a SOUTHERN E8 that's a beaut in HO- the only thing missing are the air tanks on top of the locomotive.
I've been told they can fire up the engine on that particular locomotive, but they don't trust the generator or the internal electrical system enough at this point to run it. It's still a work in progress.



Erik

[coborn35]

You guys, come on. Grow up, really. What if the bus fans said, "oh no, another tourist railroad to contend with!!!! OH NO!!" There are other people with other interests out there. They have a right to have a museum.

Instead of thinking, "Oh no another non-railfan museum to try to steal money from our museums", we should be thinking, "Oh, a bus museum, thats interesting, maybe I should go check it out to see if it really is deserving of our money" before making a rash decision. By the look of the website, they probably are deserving of money.

Just my 2 dollars:)

[espeefoamer]

QUOTE: Originally posted by artmark

QUOTE: Originally posted by AntonioFP45

PULEASE!

This is good!

Sorry guys, but I worked on buses for 15 years. They do provide an essential service in our economy.

My "all time" favorite transit coaches are the GMC "Fishbowl" series. (Same type of bus you see in the movie SPEED. Introduced in 1959, these buses ran for years and are built tough! They're still running in Canada! They broke down less frequently than their replacements, the GMC RTS series.

My favorite "long distance" bus is the MCI MC-9. Also a well built coach. MCI and Eagle were dominant in the U.S.A for so many years. Now Europeon coaches are becoming the preferred choice for many charter bus companies. (sigh!) For those of you old enough to remember the 1970s, Greyhound preferred MCI coaches while Trailways used Eagles.

Believe it or not, there are a lot of bus fans out there! There seem to be just as many bus forums as train forums.

I'm primarily a model railroader/railfan but to me I like ALL transportation modes and enjoy having model samples of the non-railroad stuff.

Be flexible and do a little exploring of other transportation modes. LIke railroads they all have their unique problems too.

Antonio,
Do you remember the Trailways "Golden Eagle" articulated with the lounge in the back. All reserved seats I believe.
Mitch

In the mid 70s I saw an ex Trailways Golden Eagle painted for A C Transit,in a bus yard in Oakland,from a passing BART train[8D].

[espeefoamer]

You can't knock busses too much. A lot of bus fans also like streetcars.

[mustanggt]

I think buses are interesting. That's why I plan on going to the seashore trolley museum this summer. They have some old fishbowls up there, and of course, light rail stuff.

[jabrown1971]

Love buses here too.........spent 15 years working for the Dog, post Trailways merger........MC8's, 9's 102A3's, 96A3's Eagle 5, 10 and 15's..............they are all really neat. Transit buses............didn't really kill the street car, cars are what killed the street car. Now that gas is $2+ a gallon don't we wi***he street cars were still here. For my two cents worth the Fishbowls are neat, but the ugly looks of the AM General series buses steal the show. Incidentally there is a small junkyard in Illinois that has a rotting corpse of an Illinois Terminal System bus.

[Anonymous]

I bike & ride the bus on occasion and take a cab about once a month if I absolutely have to It's $10.00 for a 6 mile cab ride to town, but only $30.00 on the bus for the 150 mile trip to Albany. The Amtrak station is 60 miles away but there's no way to get there except by driving. So to get out of town, it's Trailways or No ways.

So no wonder there may be a growing cadre of bus fans. I'm one.

Wayne

[Anonymous]

QUOTE: Originally posted by daveklepper

What is really interesting is the only way they tell you to reach the museum is bv private car! Doesn't Hershey, PA, have a local bus system? I think you can get to Hershey by intercity bus. Hershey used to have quite an extensive streetcar system at one time, with some cars sort of duplicates of the Boston ype 5's but with padded, not wooden, seats. It also had at least one interurban line.

I belive Amtrak stops there..

[Anonymous]

The trolley museum in Kennebunkport has buses that they had to get in paccage deal with some of there trolleys. Other trolley museum are in the same predictament. Now they cand send them somewere and consintrate on there core buisness

[ajmiller]

QUOTE: Originally posted by Dunkirkeriestation

QUOTE: Originally posted by daveklepper

What is really interesting is the only way they tell you to reach the museum is bv private car! Doesn't Hershey, PA, have a local bus system? I think you can get to Hershey by intercity bus. Hershey used to have quite an extensive streetcar system at one time, with some cars sort of duplicates of the Boston ype 5's but with padded, not wooden, seats. It also had at least one interurban line.

I belive Amtrak stops there..

Hershey PA is not on an Amtrak route.
Amtrak follows the former PRR in that part of Pennsylvania. Hershey is located on a former Reading line.

[stmtrolleyguy]

QUOTE: Originally posted by Dunkirkeriestation

There is the Polka Museum in Euclid OH...
Dont you guys get it! The Buses killed and Murdered the Trolleys! And now they want to have museum and contend for grants! What is next Bustown! instead of steamtown!

Okay, I have to disagree with this quote about busses and trolleys. Busses did replace many trolleys in many diferent cities, and in many cases the busses were all that was left. But there's a but in here.

The heyday of the trolley was around the 1920's, possible a little earlier, with a renisance around world war two (shortages of rubber and gas kept many trolleys running).

These trolley companies were privately owned enterprises. They were set up to make money, not like the public transportation systems of today. This meant that the trolley companies needed permission to run in the city streets. (Municpal systems are public systems, so they can just run in the streets regardless, in an overly simplified sense, but keep reading)

To get permission to run in the streets, and hang overhead, and lay tracks, and tare up the streets to repair the tracks, etc, trolley companies needed to get city government support. This often included a clause or agreement that the trolley company would provide certain service on certain routes to make a city concilman happy. The service needed to be run, weather anyone used it or not.

In many cases, these routes weren't used enough to warrant a trolley on them. they lost money, and keeping the routes running would run the company under, into the red. The advent of the bus allowed busses to run the routes that wouldn't support a trolley, allowing the trolley company to use the profit it made from the other routes to keep the trolleys running.

It was a trade-off. Some routes went to busses to keep the rest of the company running trolleys. So in a way, busses actually help preserve trolley systems in many cities.[:)]

Busses weren't great, and i'd really prefer a trolley, but trolleys had their problems too. With a europen design with more emphasis on private rights of way, I think trolleys would work. Personally, on city streets now, trolleys and buses are both equally large and in the way. Get the cars off the roads!

Anyhow, trolleys and busses were both important. And fishbowls look pretty good too. The real trolley killer was the automobile. People wanted total freedom of travel, even more so than a bus could provide.

[DSchmitt]

QUOTE: Originally posted by stmtrolleyguy
[ These trolley companies were privately owned enterprises. They were set up to make money, not like the public transportation systems of today. This meant that the trolley companies needed permission to run in the city streets. (Municpal systems are public systems, so they can just run in the streets regardless, in an overly simplified sense, but keep reading)

To get permission to run in the streets, and hang overhead, and lay tracks, and tare up the streets to repair the tracks, etc, trolley companies needed to get city government support. This often included a clause or agreement that the trolley company would provide certain service on certain routes to make a city concilman happy. The service needed to be run, weather anyone used it or not.

In many cases, these routes weren't used enough to warrant a trolley on them. they lost money, and keeping the routes running would run the company under, into the red. The advent of the bus allowed busses to run the routes that wouldn't support a trolley, allowing the trolley company to use the profit it made from the other routes to keep the trolleys running.

They were also often required to pay for paving and maintaining the whole street, not just the part they used.

[stmtrolleyguy]

[quote

They were also often required to pay for paving and maintaining the whole street, not just the part they used.

[trolleyboy]

I'm not a huge fan of rubber wheeled transit,but history and our past be it transit vehicles (read streetcars interurbans or buses)all deserve to be remembered and preserved.Our museum in Ontario ( Halton County Radial Railway ) main mandate is to preserve restore and operate electric railway vehicles. We have a couple of vintage buses and some electric trolley buses as displays more or less to show what is what was and what might be.Besides buses and cars may have killed the streetcar systems but gas is getting expensive and we may see the time when it comes full circle and the literail retakes it's place. Food for thought. Rob

[daveklepper]

In June 1971 I was a one-month employee of AT&T Bell Labs in Murray Hill, NJ. My regular commute was to walk from my East 16th Sty. Apartment to the PATH station at 14th and 6th Avenue, ride the then modern cars to Hoboken. I would go upstairs and board an Erie Lackawanna MU to Summit, NJ. If everything went well, this would be a reverse rush hour express, non stop. These were the old green mu's with all the right noises. At Summit, a Summit and New Providence orange bus with black lettering and trip and white striping would take me to the gate of the laboratory. That bus system was an operating bus museum. One day it would be a White gas bus, another day it would a Ford Transit gas bus, and on a third day it would be the earliest model GM standee window bus, again gas, not diesel. This was in 1971 and those buses were 29 -32 years old! But of course the mu's were even older, about 50 years old!

I enjoyed the comment about the earliest Greyhounds. Some interurban lines had similar buses, probably most did, including the Indiana Railroad, the North Shore, and the South Shore, all to reach places not served by rail.

The summer of 1948 and 1949 I attended a summer camp in Maine that had an old Reo gas bus, with the interior being just two longitudinal seats on each side. Hod in front, of course. Got to see the roadbed of the 2ft gauge Bridgeton and Harrison.

[adrianspeeder]

QUOTE: Originally posted by Dunkirkeriestation

QUOTE: Originally posted by daveklepper

What is really interesting is the only way they tell you to reach the museum is bv private car! Doesn't Hershey, PA, have a local bus system? I think you can get to Hershey by intercity bus. Hershey used to have quite an extensive streetcar system at one time, with some cars sort of duplicates of the Boston ype 5's but with padded, not wooden, seats. It also had at least one interurban line.

I belive Amtrak stops there..

No, you can get off amtrak at Harrisburg, and its a 20min drive to Hershey. 10 if I'm drivin...

Adrianspeeder

[passengerfan]

In Oregon they have a truck museum I have seen it and it is just as interesting as many of the rail museums. Having 28 years behind the wheel of trucks found it very interesting. Even though I am a railfan first and foremost.

[Modelcar]

...A page or so back I posted some memories of Greyhoud Buses back in the 30's {that I rode on }, and got to thinking about those busses and went to Google and hunted up some photos...To my surprise there are lots of pic's of them. The buses were according to the data from YELLOW COACH and the models that fit my memory seem to be the ones around 1930 ,31 and 32....Those were the buses that serviced our small town in western Pennsylvania on Rt. 30 and I would ride to Ligonier, Pa. which would require crossing the Laurel Hill mountain on 30 and it was a steep route...Seem to remember they did the job reasonably well. They looked to be a heavy rig too. That route..{still in use}, has some grades up to 10% and that is quite steep especially for a main highway...and at that time {before the Penn. Turnpike}, was the only east / west route over that mountain there for quite a few miles.
Item: Greyhound Bus drivers of that era had spiffy uniforms that included some form of high leather boots...similar to police of that era....{Again relying on memory}.

[Kurn]

I believe they were Metroliners.

[Kurn]

I guess I'll take all the busses on my layout and smash 'em to smithereens........