This is a very welcome recent addition to my neighborhood: a bright red classic Gillig bus. And of course like so many other Oregonians, it hails from California. Most recently, Marysville, where the current owner bought it from a church recently and drove it up. I’m not really jealous of his bus, as it’s too big for me, but I would have loved to make that drive.
We’ve covered Gillig buses in depth before here, so this is going to be just a quick look at this particularly fine example of the breed.
This is the big boy Gillig; a full 40 feet of solid steel. Unlike Crowns, which are built with a lot of aluminum alloys and are considered the very finest of the classic California school buses, the Gilligs were built of steel, and lots of it.
I’m quite certain the owner told me it had a CAT diesel engine back there.
It’s teamed with an Allison 6-speed automatic, whose shifter can be seen on top of that console.
This bus is in very nice original condition. It was owned by a church, who had bought it from a school district.
I kind of hate to see this one get converted into a “skoolie” camper bus, as it’s in such nice shape still.
The new owner did remove some of the seats before the trip up to Oregon, and used it as a primitive sleeping area.
If I see some serious progress being made, I’ll do an update. But so far, it’s just sitting there.
This is one of my all-time favorite bus faces. All business!
Geeze, what a honey of a survivor of an almost-never-seen bus! It pings my sense of “Why can’t we have things that look like this?”. Perhaps a replacement can be found for the missing left rear warning light visor.
Gillig is one of our local companies here in the SF Bay Area – was in Hayward, now headquarted in Livermore. They do seem to be pretty durable as buses though they’ve gotten out of the educational transport field – though they still build coaches for mass transit.
We were the talk of our Redwood Valley, CA middle school in ’73 when we got one of this exact model as our new bus, the newest in the entire fleet! It was even equipped with an AM radio system, which most of our older buses did not have, so it was doubly more of a treat to ride it every day. My bus stop was the first of the route in the morning, and the last in the afternoon, so I spent a full 3 school years riding around in bus number D-8 (the D designated the diesel engine, the 8th in the fleet).
Nice bus, and nice pics.
The green vinyl seats, with the white piping, reminds me of many school buses I rode during the mid to late 70s. As the new buses then were already adopting fully padded seat backs to replace the former metal faced backs.
In the wintertime, it was either Heaven or Hell to be seated directly behind the under seat electric heaters. You’d either want to faint from the excess heat, generated on mild winters days. Or appreciate the soothing warmth on frigid days. As school bus passenger windows always froze up with thick frost, as the heaters were never sufficient to keep buses warm. At least where I grew up in Canada. The only way to see if you were close to home, was to place your bare hand on a window to melt the frost coating, enabling you to see outside.
Wow, that’s a beauty – agree with you, its in such nice original condition, its almost a shame to turn it into a motor home. Jim.
It does look very well preserved, I guess it came from a fairly rich district that retired it when it was still quite young and the church use was fairly limited.
Very nice. I have to confess I love the VanillAroma air freshener. Can’t say I’ve ever seen a blood-orange red school bus before either although these in yellow were a very common sight for the middle thirty years of my life.
It was painted just before it was sold. The church’s name can still be barely made out under the red paint.
The bus is extremely impressive as it is. I can only hope…
Your favourite bus face? Well, it doubts that.
Those quirked eyebrow indicators and prim straight-lined bumper mouth and otherwise general blankness are the very essence of expressed dubiousness.
I also hope it gets preserved as seen in the photos. One thing nice about this Gillig is the windows retract into the body; unlike most of the Blue Bird and Thomas ‘double-hung’ windows where only half of it opens.
I drove one of these from 1987 to 1997 as a school bus driver all over California. What a great bus. We referred to it as the sports car bus since it was so nimble going through the gold country foothills.
This one appears to be automatic which is a real shame, the manual was so smooth.
Most of our drivers has a difficult time with it though, Ours at least had a Cat engine and the shift pattern was reversed so that 1st was farthest away and you shifted towards yourself as you went thru the gears.