Coachbult.com - General American Aerocoach Co.



General American Aerocoach Co. - Chicago, Illinois 1940-1946 - East Chicago, Indiana 1946-1952

General office at 135 LaSalle St, Chicago - factory at 136th Street and Brandon Avenue, Chicago.

Aerocoach made streamlined inter-city buses in Chicago from 1940 through the early 1950s. Early coaches were distinctive, later examples looked like other makers 1950s buses.

Trailways and Gray Line used Aerocoaches in the 1940s and 1950s.

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Early in 1940, Gar Wood Industries discontinued the Gar Wood bus and sold its equipment and tools to General American Transportation Corporation. This corporation then organized General American Aerocoach Corporation which commenced building an intercity type bus known as the Aerocoach bus. One model of the Aerocoach bus could have been converted from an intercity bus to an intracity, transit bus, although for all practical purposes Aerocoach and Ford buses were not competitive.

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AEROCOACH (U.S.) 1940-1952

(1) General American Aerocoach Co., Chicago, In. 19401946

(2) General American Aerocoach Co., East Chicago, Ind. 1946-1952

General American Transportation Corp., a builder and lessor of railroad cars, purchased the bus manufacturing business of Gar Wood Industries in 1939 (see GAR WOOD) and set up a new production line in Chicago early in 1940. The principle of the welded tube framework was used in an entirely new and larger type of bus later that year, and these 29 and 33-passenger buses gradually superseded the smaller type on the production line. The Aerocoach name was used for both types, so that the earliest Aerocoaches were indistinguishable (except for their nameplates) from the last Gar Woods.

International engines and five-speed Clark transmissions were standard equipment in the new, larger Aerocoaches, which were to be manufactured into the early1950's without substantial change. When bus production was stopped by material shortages in 1943, the sales record stood at approximately 250 Aerocoaches of the Gar Wood type and 300 of the new type, which was the only design resumed when manufacturing began again in April 1944. From then until the end in 1952, another 2350 buses were made. A Continental engine was offered in addition to the International power plant in 1947, and design changes were made in 1949 and 1951, but Aerocoach by then had been left behind by the changing demands of the U.S. intercity bus industry, and at the end much of its output went to foreign customers.

An effort was made to enter the transit bus business in 1948 with the introduction of handsome 36 and 45-passenger models having fully automatic heating and ventilating systems, but the venture was not successful. An interesting sideline was the rebuilding of prewar Greyhound Yellow Coaches with diesel engines and new interiors in the postwar years, under contract to Greyhound.

For more information please read:

Ed Strauss & Karen Strauss - The Bus World Encyclopedia of Buses

G.N. Georgano & G. Marshall Naul - The Complete Encyclopedia of Commercial Vehicles

Albert Mroz - Illustrated Encyclopedia of American Trucks & Commercial Vehicles

Donald F. Wood - American Buses

Denis Miller - The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Trucks and Buses

Susan Meikle Mandell - A Historical Survey of Transit Buses in the United States

David Jacobs - American Buses, Greyhound, Trailways and Urban Transportation

William A. Luke & Linda L. Metler - Highway Buses of the 20th Century: A Photo Gallery

William A. Luke & Brian Grams - Buses of Motorcoach Industries 1932-2000 Photo Archive

William A. Luke - Greyhound Buses 1914-2000 Photo Archive

William A. Luke - Prevost Buses 1924-2002 Photo Archive