Vintage Buses

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• At least they aren't yellow! A joke went around for years..What is long and yellow and comes in bunches? Answer: Transit Windsor!

  Thanks for the pics Andrew!

• Don't thank me thank Bernie and John. :)

  I wonder what it was about yellow and this city? When I first moved here I remember the Fire Trucks were Yellow too...

  Buses
  Fire trucks
  Taxis

  Sheesh!

  Almost fitting since we live in a banana republic! :)

• What city where these buses made in? Did Windsor ever make buses? Did we make any parts for these buses? To me, it would give it more meaning if this was a history of vehicles or its parts made locally as I thought this site was about the history of the Windsor/Detroit area and the pride of Windsor, not Oshawa, St. Catherines or some other city we've lost out to.

• David, it is our history. These are all Transit Windsor busses, as these busses all roamed our streets, they are a part of our local history. Some of the businesses featured on the busses like Central Chrysler and Big V are all part of Windsor's history.

  Asking what city the buses were made in, is almost a dumb as asking what brickyard the bricks in a certain building came from.

  So should I not feature a building on here if it wasn't desinged by a local architect or if the steel used to make it was imported from Ohio?

• David, these slide scans represent the very first Transit Windsor buses to have hand-painted advertising. The Big V bus was the very first of these. Buses today are 'wrapped' in a vinyl like material.

  As far as relevancy to Windsor's history is concerned, Transit Windsor is one of the country's oldest transit systems and was the first in the country to introduce streetcars as well as the first trolley bus. It deserves to be profiled. To those of us today, many Gen X/Y'ers remember going to/from highschool on these GM newlooks and they are part of our past whether they were built in London or wherever.

  Maybe this article didn't do it for you. But I think others might have enjoyed it and had a memory or two triggered at the site of these old buses.

• The robot arms are certainly creepy!

• How would Dave even begin to limit things to just Windsor? That would be impossible, but what a magnificent exercise in provincialism. Please start that blog, just so we can see how that would work.

• Well, I know that bricks were made locally because it was cheaper to use local clay.

  Who cares about steel? That's Hamilton's thing. Coca Cola is Atlanta, Georgia's thing. The film industry is Hollywood's thing. Finance is Toronto's thing.

  And no, I don't think it's stupid because Windsor is supposed to be the automotive capital. The auto industry is Windsor's pride and history, what once made this city great. Most of the great buildings in this city were built because of the wealth brought in from the automotive industry. At the turn of the last century, Detroit had a population of 150,000. Then, Henry Ford introduced the moving assembly line and the $5 wage and Detroit skyrocketed to 1.6 million by 1930. 2 million by 1950. All the auto giants rose in Detroit. And, that wealth trickled down to Windsor, also setting up plants in Windsor. Most of the great historical mansions were somehow related to the auto industry--vehicles or their components made in either Windsor or Detroit. The Seagrave building was such a tragedy because its history lies in its building the first Canadian Seagrave fire engine. Transportation and the gas engine is what built this city. Without it, we'd be just some another small, irrelevant border city.

  Why not do an article on the Subaru, Kia, or some Korea made car that somehow managed to used in this city? Why not do articles on vintage Japanese cars. Those vehicles have nothing to do with the history of this city. It just feels like an unpatriotic knife in the back to see vintage vehicles promoted that don't appear to have promoted the wealth, history and well-being of this city. Even thought I'm not big on unions and the damage they caused, I still believe in buying vehicles related to the history of this city to show my continuity to the past and love of history. You gave me a fuss when I talked about locally owned restaurants vs. Pepper's because of the history, yet the local auto industry doesn't somehow factor into this?

• The vintage buses sure do bring back memories. Thank you to the people (Bernie/John) for making the photos available for us to see (sharing) and Andrew for posting on his blog.

  Does anyone know who the artist was who came up with the Robotic Arms for the KFC Bus? What was he trying to convey?

• I think the robotic arms were meant to seem as though the people you would see through the windows of the bus were using them.