Manitoba Business
The Motor Bus City A long history of designing and building passenger buses in Winnipeg By Alex Regiec
F
or the past 90 years, both New Flyer and Motor Coach Industries have manufactured urban transit buses and inter-city highway coaches at their Winnipeg-based facilities. From their humble independent beginnings, the companies prospered as bus transportation developed and grew into both a public utility and a commercial service. These companies are now part of the NFI Group, a leading global manufacturer of buses, headquartered in the Manitoba capital. NFI is the largest bus manufacturer in North America. From Fort Garry Motor Body & Paint Works to Motor Coach Industries Motor Coach Industries was started by Dmytro Federick Sicinski, in 1924, as Fort Garry Tire and Service Limited. It was located at 205 Fort Street. Responding to a growing demand for collision repairs to cars and trucks, Sicinski established a partnership with Harry Zoltok in April 1932. This became Fort Garry Motor Body and Paint Works which expanded into the business of automotive repair next door at 208 Fort Street. The company soon ventured into building truck bodies and converting automobiles into 11-passenger buses. Zoltok reportedly sketched the design details onto the factory floor for his workers to follow. The first bus was constructed and delivered to local motor bus service operator, Clark Transportation Company of Dauphin. By 1934, Fort Garry Motor Body and Paint Works was building bus bodies to be mounted onto truck chassis. After successfully rebuilding a pair of old buses for Central Canadian Greyhound Lines of Calgary, the company designed and constructed the rugged model 37-UM for its new western customer and its affiliate company, Trans Continental Coach Lines of Winnipeg. Fort Garry Motor Body and Paint Works was one of the first bus manufacturers to use stainless steel exterior paneling to prevent corrosion, a major problem for the early bus operators. In 1938, the company introduced the model 150 series, a 29-passenger coach powered by a pancake engine, a horizontal engine mounted under the “monocoque structure”, an automotive design system that combines chassis and body and provides better stiffness and
26 • Spring 2020
1968 Western Flyer D700 transit bus prototype.
weight distribution. The company changed its name in 1941 to Motor Coach Industries Limited, moving to a 20,000-squarefoot plant located on St. Matthews Avenue at Erin Street. Although the company had primarily built inter-city highway buses, in 1942 a one-of-a-kind electric trolley coach was constructed for the Winnipeg Electric Company, operator of the city’s urban transit system. During the Second World War the entire production capability of the Motor Coach facility was converted into manufacturing for the war effort. After the war, the company returned to the engineering and production of inter-city highway buses, developing the Model 100 in 1946 as Canada’s first rear engine bus. Throughout the 1950s MCI’s Courier series was a popular bus model sold to many service operators across Canada and becoming the standard for the Canadian Greyhound fleet. In fact, Greyhound liked the buses so much that, in 1948, they purchased an ownership stake in Motor Coach Industries. Then, in 1958, MCI became a wholly owned subsidiary of Greyhound Lines of Canada leading to much growth and innovation. The Hub
