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Thomas Built Buses, Inc.

Thomas Built Buses, Inc. is a bus manufacturer based in High Point, North Carolina in the United States.

Contents

1 Perley A. Thomas: streecar and bus pioneer

2 Perley A. Thomas Car Works

3 A transition to Buses: the 1930s

4 See Also

5 External Links and References

Perley A. Thomas: streecar and bus pioneer

Perley A. Thomas (1874-1958) was a native Canadian and a millwright by trade. He worked for a subsidiary of the famous streetcar manufacturer J.G. Brill and Company , in Cleveland, Ohio, early in the 20th century, and attended night school courses in structural engineering at Case Institute of Technology then moved south to work for another streetcar builder at it High Point, North Carolina location in 1910. Thomas became chief engineer, draftsman and designer for the company, using both his mechanical skills and his experience as a skilled woodworker. When the streetcar industry began to turn from wooden to steel construction, Thomas was able to make the switch, but his employer, Southern Car Company went out of business in 1916.

Perley A. Thomas Car Works

In 1917, Thomas founded Perley A. Thomas Car Works, Inc., his own streetcar building company using the former facilities and many employees of the Southern Car Company . During the next 20 years, Perley A. Thomas streetcars were built and delivered to communities all across the United States, including New Orleans, where they operated on the Desire line made famous by Tennessee Williams' 1947 Broadway play and later film of the same name, A Streetcar Named Desire.

A transition to Buses: the 1930s

The national trend in the United States in the 1920s and 1930s was toward use of personal automobiles rather than riding public transportation. As streetcar ridership decreased, less costly buses were often used in substitution by the companies operating the service. Orders for new streetcars and renovations began falling off.

Just as he had made the transition from wooden to steel streetcar building, Thomas and his workers at High Point also made the transition to building buses successfully. In 1934, Duke Power of South Carolina had Thomas build 10 transit buses. In 1936, Thomas ceased production of streetcars and launched a new product: the school bus. The same year, the company built built 200 wooden-bodied school buses for the state of North Carolina, beginning a long tradition with that state which continues to the present-day. In the early days of the school bus, Perley Thomas and his company's reputation for design innovation and quality manufacturing helped transform the industry.

In the United States, many school buses in the 1930s were nothing more than flatbed truck chassis with wooden sides and a canvas roof. They had no lights, no mirrors and were much more suited to transporting vegetables to market than children to and from school.

Perley A Thomas Car Works Inc. introduced a number of safety features to their buses. Body ribs of bent steel were added and extended below the bus floor to help prevent smaller vehicles from running under the bus in a collision and causing a rollover. In 1938, the company introduced the first welded all-steel bus body. In 1939, Dr. Frank W. Cyr of New York, who became known as The Father of the Yellow School Bus, hosted a 7 day long national conference of industry and school leaders which established 44 important safety standards and the yellow color for school buses all across the United States.

Thomas has always been a leading name in church bus and school bus safety efforts. The company became a major school bus body builder in the post-World War II period. By the 1970s, it was one of the big six school bus body companies in the United States, competing with Blue Bird Body Company, Carpenter Body Company, Superior Coach Company , Ward Body Company , and Wayne Corporation.

Thomas Built Buses, Inc. was incorporated in 1972. Previously dependent upon truck chassis made by other companies for its bodies, in 1978, Thomas introduced its first bus chassis and began producing its popular Saf-T-Liner transit-style bus for school and commercial use. In 1980, the company began to manufacture a smaller conventional school bus on a cutaway van chassis, the Thomas Minotour. It entered the commercial public transit bus market in the 1980s, and developed the Thomas Vista school bus, a modified conventional design providing improved front-end visibility for drivers, and its MVP line, a less expensive version of its transit-style school bus in the 1990s.

Thomas became one of the three principal builders of large school buses in the United States by the end of the 20th Century. It is still based in High Point, and in 1998, was acquired by the Freightliner Group of Daimler-Chrysler a worldwide automotive manufacturer.

In 2004, Perley A. Thomas , founder of the Thomas streetcar and bus building companies, who died in 1958, was among the first inductees into the Raleigh-based, North Carolina Transportation Hall of Fame .

External Links and References

Last updated: 06-02-2005 22:47:58

Science Fair Project Encyclopedia Contents Page

10-26-2009 08:16:03
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