Great Lakes Greyhound Lines - Eastern Michigan Motorbuses

Eastern Michigan Motorbuses

In 1924 the Detroit United Railway (DUR) Company, an electric interurban rail carrier, formed a highway-coach subsidiary, then named as the People’s Motor Coach (PMC) Company, to enable its parent firm to reduce its operating costs and to enhance its competitive position against an increasing number of rivals operating buses on the improving roads.

During the following years the PMC Company developed an extensive bus system, mostly by the acquisition of pre-existing smaller companies, operating along both suburban and intercity routes.

In one notable event, late in 1924 the DUR Company bought the Detroit-Toledo Transportation Company from Ralph A.L. Bogan, another original busman from northern Minnesota. Bogan (along with Swan Sundstrom, another early driver in Hibbing, Minnesota, and elsewhere) had (in 1923) used the brand name, trade name, or service name of the Blue Goose Lines, as he had previously used the same brand name for one other bus company (the Gray Motor Stage Line, running in Wisconsin, between Janesville and Watertown) and later (in 1925) used it again for a third firm (running in Indiana, from Indianapolis southward to Evansvillle and northward to Kokomo and soon onward to Fort Wayne). The DUR Company extended the name of the Blue Goose Lines (and the image of a blue goose) to its entire intercity system.

Eventually all three of those Bogan routes became segments of the growing Greyhound route network; Bogan himself continued as a key player at Greyhound, serving eventually as the vice president during the presidency of Orville Swan Caesar (1946–56) of The Greyhound Corporation, after the retirement of Carl Eric Wickman, the principal founder of Greyhound.

Other acquired firms included the White Star Motorbus Company, the Wolverine Transit Company, the Star Motor Coach Line, and the Highway Motorbus Company.

The DUR Company in 1928 became renamed as the Eastern Michigan (EM) Railways, and the PMC Company, its highway-coach subsidiary, in 1928 became likewise renamed as the Eastern Michigan Motorbuses (EMM); then in -31 the EM Railways went into the second (and final) bankruptcy and reorganization.

The renamed EMM continued to acquire other firms, including the Southern Michigan Transportation Company, the Great Lakes Motor Bus Company, and the Grosse Ile Rapid Transit Company (which had begun in 1919 as the Grosse Ile Transportation Company).

Despite the lack of success of the parent EM Railways, by 1938 the subsidiary EM Motorbuses had become the largest intrastate bus company in the Wolverine State.

Then The Greyhound Corporation, the parent Greyhound firm, bought a controlling (majority) interest in the EMM under the supervision of the receivers (and the court) in bankruptcy.

However, the federal Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) did not at first allow Greyhound to exercise control over the EMM or to merge it into Greyhound, not until 1941, after a change in the membership of the ICC.

Because of the large size of the EMM, its route network, and its operations, The Greyhound Corporation created a new subsidiary, named as the Great Lakes Greyhound Lines, which in 1941 took over the EMM.