Railway specialists are perhaps the most numerous and fanatical of transportation historians.
Even the most obscure and unimportant branch lines have their aficionados. They preserve lists of locomotive numbers and specifications, numerous details of lines now vanished, along with photographs and anything in the slightest way related to the subject.
Airplane fans, while less numerous, also amass historical details of their subjects, and watch in delight restoration projects of old models.
Exhibits of old automobiles always draw large crowds. At the bottom of the list are buses. There are very few historians who will admit to an interest in them, and those that do are quiet about it lest they attract derision from those who study the history of other modes of transportation.
Consequently, we do not know a lot about what was, for a few decades, a vital means of transportation.
Intercity bus lines emerged during the 1920s, and the early years were a fascinating free-for-all in terms of new companies and routes, types of equipment, and few regulatory requirements.
Interestingly, buses began to thrive at the same time that railways reached their peak in terms of passenger service and passenger-miles. Canadian railway passenger patronage reached is peak in 1927, despite increasing competition over the previous decade from automobile competition.
Unlike the railways, which required vast sums of investment, a bus line was cheap to start. Some operators began with a single second-hand vehicle, often jerry-rigged or otherwise adapted for bus service.
Other companies were larger, but still possessed only a few vehicles. They added and dropped routes frequently in their search for a profitable and sustainable business. Capturing a complete picture of those early years is a challenge for historians.
In this part of Ontario the bus industry had its origins with transportation services operated by hotel owners between their premises and local railway stations. The first of those services were horse-drawn carriages connecting with arriving and departing trains. In the first decade of the 20th century many hotel operators found that it was cheaper to offer a motorized service.
By the First World War era jitneys had become common, especially in the larger centres. These were ordinary motor cars whose owners tried to offset their expenses by taking paying passengers. Most carried a sign on the windshield indicating their route.
Eventually the jitney was banned in most jurisdictions. Taxi operators claimed that jitneys were skimming the most profitable business. As well, there was a flood of lawsuits resulting from accidents and injuries.
A few jitney services existed briefly in small towns. One was operated by J.E. Brown of Elora. He operated a scheduled daily service between Fergus and Elora in 1921, and offered to take Elora residents to and from the Canadian National Railway station.
In 1925 the Canada Coach Company announced a daily service between Guelph and Owen Sound. This service competed with an excellent train service between those two cities, but the bus was willing to stop anywhere along the route to pick up and drop passengers, and it offered direct service to Guelph from Durham, Mount Forest and Arthur, which were not connected to Guelph directly by train.
The service began May 10, 1926, using a couple of brand new 21-seat REO buses. There were two round trips daily, and a third on weekends. Unlike the railway, the bus provided service on Sundays. The fare between Fergus and Guelph was 40 cents, more than an hour’s salary at the time for the majority of workers.
Within a year, though, Canada Coach abandoned the service. A new company, Arrow Bus Lines, took over the route, with a schedule that was a virtual duplicate of the one pioneered by Canada Coach. In addition, there were two additional round trips on Saturday between Guelph, Elora and Fergus.
The service outraged merchants in Fergus and Elora, who watched passengers climb aboard to take advantage of bargains and selections offered by Wyndham Street merchants in the Royal City. The last bus from Guelph on Saturdays departed at 10:30pm. That allowed Elora and Fergus people to enjoy movies at one of the three theatres then operating in downtown Guelph.
By the summer of 1929 Arrow Bus Lines operated as a subsidiary of Central Ontario Coach Lines. The larger company had ambitions to develop an extensive network of services to compete with rail service.
In July of 1929 the Arrow company received permission from regulatory authorities to add a number of new routes to its network. Among them were services between Stratford and Woodstock, London to Owen Sound by way of Goderich and Kincardine, Mitchell to Arthur via Palmerston, Arthur to Kincardine, and Elora to Harriston.
It appears that most of those routes were not well patronized and did not survive long. Nevertheless, the additions provided Wellington County with the most comprehensive bus service in its history, only a half dozen years after intercity buses began running in the county.
In addition to Arrow, there were other bus services that operated briefly. One was the Toronto, Kitchener and London Bus Company. Its main route operated through Guelph, but in the summer of 1926 it scheduled a daily bus through Fergus. The company declared bankruptcy in January 1927 after losing a damage suit filed by an injured passenger. Another company was the King’s Highway Bus Line, which operated from Guelph to points south.
Central Ontario Bus Lines operated some services outside its Arrow subsidiary. In the early 1930s the company offered service from several local towns to the Canadian National Exhibition.
Unlike its competitors, which seldom had long lives, Arrow Bus Lines persisted with its twice-daily service between Guelph and Owen Sound, and several runs between Guelph and Toronto. By 1935 trips between Elora and Toronto took a few minutes less than three hours, including transfers at Guelph. That was in good weather. Roads in the 1930s were not well maintained during winter, and bus service often ran hours late or was suspended altogether during unfavourable weather. Still, the situation had improved greatly since the company began, when service was cancelled for days at a time due to closed roads.
In the late 1930s the inevitable process of consolidation resulted in a restructuring of the bus industry. In 1937 Gray Coach Lines of Toronto purchased Arrow. At the time it operated only nine coaches, indicating that at least some of the routes added in 1929 had been abandoned.
Gray Coach was a subsidiary of the Toronto Transit Commission. Beginning in 1937 the company began buying up many of the bus lines running into Toronto to serve as feeders for the buses and streetcars running on the streets of the Queen City. By the end of that year Gray Coach was the dominant bus line serving the area west of Toronto.
Bus passenger volumes reached their historic peak in the late 1940s and early 1950s. In that period, runs on the weekends frequently required two buses to accommodate the passenger load. With increased motor car ownership in the 1950s patronage entered a slow decline that continues to the present.
By the late 1960s Gray Coach began experimenting with variations to the twice-daily service from Guelph via Fergus and Mount Forest to Owen Sound. Patronage as it always had been, was strongest on weekends. During the week service dropped to a single run, and there were trials of new schedules, some of which did not go as far as Owen Sound.
A major development was the sale by the City of Toronto of Gray Coach Lines in 1991, initially to a British company, and then to Greyhound Lines, the dominant bus company in North America.
Greyhound had little success in building the local routes, which had become unsustainable due to poor patronage. As the 21st century dawned service was further reduced several times, and then eliminated completely. Also discontinued was the once-lucrative line between Guelph and Hamilton.
Today, service exists only between Guelph and Toronto, and between Guelph and Kitchener to London.
Travel has become virtually impossible for most of the county without access to an automobile.