Glacier National Park's red buses in new home
Glacier Park’s vaunted red buses have a cozy new home. Xanterra Parks and Resorts recently completed a brand new state-of-the-art, climate-controlled storage facility and garage on Highway 206 south of Columbia Falls.
Work on the $2-million-plus garage began last March and mechanics and staff moved in Oct. 1. All 33 of Glacier Park’s red buses are stored there as well as other vehicles from the company’s fleet, including two new wheelchair accessible buses that were used this summer.
“It’s the first time the buses have been stored in a heated space during the winter,” said Dave Eglsaer, director of transportation for Glacier Park Lodges, the branch of Xanterra that manages its Glacier Park properties.
Eglsaer began his career with former Park concessionaire Glacier Park Inc. and took the same post with Xanterra after it won the concessions contract in 2014. When GPI owned the buses, they were stored in an unheated garage in East Glacier. That may have been beneficial to the buses’ wood frames because it inhibited bacteria growth, but not the paint, Eglsaer noted. With the new climate-controlled garage, the company can control humidity, temperature and a host of other environmental factors, Eglsaer he said.
The garage is also designed to keep the buses safe, with a variety of security and fire prevention measures. It has a complete sprinkler, carbon dioxide detection and a propane detection system.
The company will begin rebuilding the reds next year. The bodies have wood frames, with a sheet metal skin. The frames need to be repaired or replaced and the mechanical components need to be rebuilt. The company also has plans to replace the current dashes, which are stock dashes from Ford, with more traditional round gauge controls, like what the original buses had. The wood frames and components often have to be hand-built from scratch.
Just maintaining them can be a challenge, Eglsaer said. If a person, for example, over cranks a window, the components inside can be difficult to fix and a bus with a broken window crank is out of service until it can be fixed.
The average bus currently has between 130,000 and 150,000 miles on it. The buses were last rebuilt from 1999 to 2002 by the Ford Motor Co. in a deal where GPI donated the buses to the National Parks Foundation and the foundation, in turn, gave them to Glacier National Park.
Under Xanterra’s concession contract with the Park, they’re required to rebuild the fleet.
Eglsaer said the company will likely do one or two buses the first year and then ramp it up to four or five a year until the entire fleet is done.
The estimated cost is about $250,000 per bus.
He said the hope is to use local craftsmen and suppliers much as possible. About 8 to 10 buses will continue to run on propane as an alternative fuel as well as gas. Initially, all the buses Ford rebuilt ran on propane or gas, but over time, the injection systems failed and parts were difficult to find and expensive for the propane systems. Last year about 50,000 visitors to Glacier rode the reds and each bus averaged about 10,000 miles. Eglsaer said he checked GPI archives of bus use in the 1930s and ‘40s and found they were driven about 8,000 miles annually per bus, but only transported about 12,000 people.