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Re: [CBQ] Trailways and Burlington Affiliation

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Subject: Re: [CBQ] Trailways and Burlington Affiliation
From: "Chris Atkins tcatkins@gmail.com [CBQ]" <CBQ@yahoogroups.com>
Date: Wed, 08 Jul 2015 19:02:13 -0500
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I stopped at the Heart Mountain visitor center between Powell and Cody, WY today. The Japanese internment camp was right on the CB&Q tracks and they have several photos of Burlington trains bringing internees in 1942, as well as trains leaving the camp in the fall of 1945.

One very interesting part of the film they show is color footage of a Trailways bus leaving the camp full of Japanese Americans, crossing the track, and getting on the highway. The bus is very clearly marked with a Burlington Route rectangle logo.

However you feel about this part of our shared history, it is interesting to see the CB&Q connection.

I know there were eventually about a hundred of these camps built for not only Japanese but Germans and Italians, as well as actual POW camps in the continental US, but Heart Mountain was the first they have done a very good job presenting their story.

Chris Atkins
Argyle, TX

On 5/27/15 9:26 AM, Randal O'Toole rot@ti.org [CBQ] wrote:
 

Trailways was not a single company but a group of bus companies that decided to market themselves together. There’s a web site that details the history of Trailways. Unfortunately, it has a lot of pop-up ads. Below is the first chapter from the web site, which happens to be about Burlington Trailways. You can read more at http://www.webring.org/l/rd?ring=buses;id=1;url=""> — just close the pop-up ads if and when they open.

Railroad operation/ownership of bus companies went through some regulatory stages. What is now Greyhound was once owned by the Great Northern which saw it as a substitute for branchline trains. After GN gave the company $10 million, it bought up other companies and soon was running buses well outside of GN territory.

But at some point the ICC ruled that railroads could only run buses parallel to their own routes, so GN divested itself of Greyhound, while Burlington, Santa Fe, Southern Pacific (which owned half of what would become Pacific Greyhound), and Union Pacific began running buses in direct competition with their own transcontinental trains. Then, I believe at some point, the ICC ordered the railroads to divest their bus interests entirely.

Randal O’Toole
Camp Sherman, Oregon
http://streamlinermemories.info

Installment One

Burlington Trailways
I was going through some of the paper stuff I've accumulated over the years and had the idea that I might post some timetable scans -- the covers that is - that were eye catching and maybe comment a little about the companies that put them out or what was going on with the association at that time.

The first one is the oldest Trailways timetable I have, issued April 5, 1936. The National Trailways Bus System was formed on February 2,1936, in Chicago, Illinois, with five founding members, Burlington, Santa Fe, Missouri Pacific, Safeway of Illinois and Martz.

The idea for the association and the two key players were Burlington and Santa Fe. Missouri Pacific joined because they saw the other two railroad properties starting something and they didn't want to be left out. Safeway of Illinois and Martz were recruited by Burlington and Santa Fe to provide a feed from the east for their buses at Chicago.

As you can see by the scan of the advertising piece from the center of the timetable, little more than two months later, there were eight members, adding the Rio Grande Motorway, Denver-Colorado Springs-Pueblo Motorway and Denver-Salt Lake-Pacific Stages. By July, those eight members had doubled to 16 members in those three months and included Tri-State Transit which would become Continental Southern Lines and Bowen Motor Coaches which became Continental Bus System.

The reason the Trailways "idea" caught on so fast is in one word, Greyhound. In the late 20's and early 30's, Motor Transit Management (Greyhound) was busy putting together a nationwide system of bus companies using the Greyhound name and the public was beginning to recognize Greyhound as a company who could take you coast to coast. While Greyhound wouldn't finish buying out the railroad interests until the late 40's and early 50's, they succeeded in getting the name out there.

Obviously, while Burlington and Santa Fe could promote their services in their service area, they could not afford to maintain off line offices and do advertising promotion away from home. On the same tack, Martz might be known as having service to Buffalo, Chicago or Cleveland, but not San Francisco.

Trailways was an attempt to form a non-profit operating trade association to spread a common name coast to coast with each member representing the other members as if it were his service. Worked too. Most people fail to see that the secret to making Trailways work is to loose yourself inside the association. Best example of that were the east coast carriers during the 60's-70's and 80's when all you saw on the bus was Trailways except for the certificate lettering on the baggage doors. During that period. with the exception of Continental, all the member company's buses were just marked "Trailways," Martz being the sole exception.




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Posted by: Chris Atkins <chris@railroadmodelers.com>



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