2 weeks Ago By Greg Williams
Article content Working as a bartender at Waterton Park’s famous Prince of Wales hotel in the 1970s, Ray Djuff found his customers asked plenty of questions while sipping beverages at the bar. “They’d ask about the hotel, they’d ask if it was always this windy, and they’d ask about the red buses serving the Prince of Wales at that time,” Djuff says from his Calgary home. “Fifty years later, I’ve still not gotten all the answers.
” Early on, Djuff learned very little had been written to document the history of Waterton National Park in southwestern Alberta and Glacier National Park in northwestern Montana. He was curious about the chalets and hotels in the parks. Importantly, he was just as curious about the motor vehicles used to ferry tourists and sightseers around what were Great Northern Railway’s properties in the parks, starting in 1914.
Of all the vehicles ever employed the most iconic are the White Motor Company Model 706 red buses that have been in use in Glacier since 1936. “If they (the parks, hotels and buses) were mentioned in books, it was summarized and mentioned only in passing,” Djuff explains, so to fuel his curiosity he began researching both the parks and the buses, acquiring hours of first-hand interviews and boxes of documentation. Armed with this archival material, he’s written and published several books — and co-authored more with Chris Morrison — all about the parks.
Recently, he turned his attention to documenting the history of the White Motor Company Model 706 buses that continue to ply the roads in Glacier National Park. The result is his newest book, Glacier’s Reds: The Quest to Save the Park’s Historic Buses . They are lumbering and seemingly old, but as prized a sight as any grizzly bear or mountain goat in Glacier National Park, Montana,” Djuff writes of “the park’s renowned red buses.
” Djuff, a retired newspaper reporter and editor, introduces readers to the men essentially responsible for creating the park’s early transportation system. They were Roe Emery, Walter White and Howard Hays. “Hays, more than anyone,” Djuff writes, “is the unheralded figure behind the red buses.
He helped in their design, brought them to Glacier and established procedures related to the buses that are still followed today.” When Going-to-the-Sun Road first opened in 1933, it was Hays who pushed for new buses to take advantage of the increased tourist trade. Several manufacturers were invited to tender, including Ford, GM, REO and White.
Guidelines had to be met, with stipulations on weight, number of passenger seats and style of roof – fully convertible or “open top with fixed windows,” Djuff notes. He says Hays, “wanted to ensure passengers got the best view of Going-to-the-Sun Highway.” The White Model 706 chassis was selected with a 318 cubic-inch inline six-cylinder engine coupled with a four-speed manual transmission with unsynchronized gears.
For the body, which would be mated to the White chassis, a design by Steamline Moderne adherent Count Alexis de Sakhnoffsky of Bender Body Co. was selected. Built from hand-formed aluminium, no two bus bodies are identical.
The first buses arrived at the park in 1936, with most of the rest delivered in 1937. Four more arrived in 1938, and the last one in ’39 for a total of 35. They were an immediate success and the young men who drove them, known as “gearjammers,” were proud to pilot them.
“The buses wouldn’t be the beloved cultural artifacts they are without the drivers, gearjammers,” Djuff says. “Hired for their personalities, that really comes through in the tour talks they provide—insightful with a witty, personal bent.” Over the decades, the red buses have been threatened with replacement but were never retired.
However, after being retrofitted in 1989-90 with new Ford engines and transmissions, serious structural and safety issues later emerged in the original White frames. As a result, in 1999, the entire fleet was pulled from service. It was former gearjammer Leroy Lott who contacted Djuff and asked him to write the history of the red buses.
“(Lott) did not want to see the buses retired, he wanted to see them restored,” Djuff explains. “I wrote a 20- or 30-page monograph that appeared in Motor Coach Age , and it helped increase awareness of the situation. There was a period of uncertainty about the buses until Ford agreed to help.
” Ford provided some funding and worked with vehicle specialist ACI Carron, Inc. of Michigan, to rebuild test bus No. 98 with an F-450 chassis underpinning it.
That was a success, but all remaining buses, including No. 98, were restored with an E-350 chassis (lower ride height) and dual-fuel 5.4-litre V8 engines and automatic transmissions.
The red buses returned to the Park’s roads by 2003. In 2019, another retrofit program incorporating Ford parts began at Legacy Classic Trucks of Driggs, Idaho. New E-350 frames and new gasoline-only engines were included, as were wheels, tires and dashboards designed to look more age-appropriate for the 1930s buses.
As of 2024, about one-third of the fleet has been upgraded. Djuff’s insightful Glacier’s Reds is available from Amazon.ca.
It’s been well-received, he says, and it’s filled with history and little-known details about Glacier Park and its buses. “I’ve had lifelong residents of the Park tell me they learned things they didn’t know about, and that was my goal.” Greg Williams is a member of the Automobile Journalists Association of Canada (AJAC).
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