The Motor Bus City

A long history of designing and building passenger buses in Winnipeg

By Alex Regiec

For 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.

1968 Western Flyer D700 transit bus prototype.

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 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.

Western Flyer Canuck.

MCI MC-7.

MCI Fort Garry Plant in 1969.

In 1963, MCI entered the United States marketplace by forming a company called Motor Coach Industries Incorporated and establishing a plant at Pembina, North Dakota. In order to keep up with growing demand, the St. Matthews Plant was expanded in 1966 and an additional manufacturing facility was constructed in the Fort Garry Industrial Park in suburban Winnipeg.

Historically, most inter-city highway coaches were a standard single deck at 35 feet in length and 96 inches wide, however in 1969 MCI challenged the norm by pioneering the revolutionary three-level MC-6 Supercruiser model measuring 42 feet in length and 102 inches wide. This set the future standard for modern present-day coaches.

In 1987, the Greyhound Dial Corporation of Phoenix, Arizona sold off its Greyhound bus operations in both Canada and the United States. Then in 1993, Greyhound sold MCI. The company then established independent headquarters in Schaumberg, Illinois, but Winnipeg’s New Flyer acquired Motor Coach Industries in 2015.

Today Motor Coach Industries is North America’s largest manufacturer of inter-city highway coaches commanding nearly 50 per cent of the market share. MCI continues to move forward with innovative advancements in low-floor accessibility, fuel efficiency, environmentally clean engines and research and development of all-electric powered coaches.

The company employs a multitude of engineers, technicians and tradespeople both in the Winnipeg and Pembina facilities.

From Western Auto and Truck Body Works to New Flyer

Located on the opposite side of Winnipeg, Western Auto and Truck Body Works Limited was founded by partners John Coval and Nicholas Syzek in 1931. The pair led a small cadre of tradespeople into building truck and bus bodies at the northeast corner of Martha Street and Logan Avenue. They constructed their first bus body on truck chassis for the Red River Motor Coach and Transit Company Limited of Winnipeg.

Syzek sold his ownership interest in summer 1931 and Coval welcomed a new partner by the name of John Markiw by year’s end.

MCI Courier 85A.

1960 Western Flyer Coach P-41 Canuck.

1979 MCI MC-9 Demo.

In the early 1940s, Western Auto and Truck Body Works developed a monocoque-framed, 28-passenger bus called the Western Flyer. The strong performance record of this heavy-duty bus on the rugged highways of the Canadian prairies convinced the Government of Canada to award a major contract to build buses for the war effort.

Shortly after the conclusion of World War II, the company changed its name to Western Flyer Coach Limited, focussing its business on manufacturing solid inter-city coaches for many regional scheduled bus operators and continuing to produce buses under contract for the respective military forces of Canada and the United States.

As North America benefitted from a prosperous economy in the 1950s, top competitor General Motors Truck and Bus Division of Detroit collaborated with U.S. Greyhound Lines to manufacture and operate the very popular Scenicruiser, a distinctive two-level parlor design motor coach.

In response, Western Flyer Coach developed a similar deck-and-a-half offering called the T36-2L but produced only four units for local customers; two units were purchased by Thiessen Transportation Limited, a third one was supplied to Moore’s Trans-Canada Bus Lines and the final one delivered to Eagle Bus Lines. However, immediately after this experiment, Western Flyer developed its very successful Canuck rear-engine model which was purpose-built for the rough and tumble road conditions experience by bus operators across Western Canada.

Abraham J. Thiessen acquired Western Flyer Coach in 1963. Under his direction, the company redesigned its inter-city highway coach resulting in the introduction of the all-new light-weight Canuck 500, produced at a new factory located in the Fort Garry Industrial Park in suburban Winnipeg. Sales were less than expected and in four short years, the company redesigned the product and introduced the restyled Canuck 600 series. This new offering was available in two lengths; 35-foot and 38-foot versions.

By late 1967, rapidly changing marketplace conditions led to the exploration of a completely alternative product line. The company’s research and development wing constructed a prototype urban transit bus called the D700. Initial response was encouraging with orders from Winnipeg Transit and, in 1968, from the Toronto Transit Commission with a 150-unit order for a combination of D700 diesel buses and E700 electric trolley coaches.

Facing financial challenges, Western Flyer Coach was sold in 1971 to the Manitoba Crown agency, the Manitoba Development Corporation. Western Flyer Coach was renamed Flyer Industries Limited and partnered with AM General Corporation of South Bend, Indiana to jointly develop the successful, heavy-duty D800 and D901 urban transit bus models. Flyer Industries also continued to offer electric trolley coach versions known as the E800 and E901 specifically for cities like Vancouver and San Francisco that operate active trolley coach services.

Then in 1968, Jan den Oudsten, a member of the family that owned Den Oudsten Bussen BV, a manufacturer of buses in Woerden, Netherlands, purchased Flyer Industries from the Manitoba Government. He changed the company name to New Flyer Industries Limited and embarked on a modernization of its manufacturing processes, re-engineering its product line.

Under private ownership, innovations such as the introduction of the first low-floor accessible urban transit bus in North America, leadership in development of alternative fuel technologies and all-electric battery powered buses have turned the company around, making it North America’s leading manufacturer of heavy-duty urban transit buses with nearly 50 per cent of market share.

Shortly after den Oudsten retired in 2002, New Flyer was purchased by two private equity firms that lead to the entity becoming a publicly traded company in 2005.

New Flyer Winnipeg Transit 996 Electric Bus from Nov. 27, 2014.

MCI J4500 Coach from July 20, 2018.

New Flyer Xcelsior Electric from Nov. 21, 2018.

Now the NFI Group

In 2009, Paul Soubry, formerly President and CEO of StandardAero, took over as President and CEO of New flyer Industries, now NFI Group.

Under his leadership, the NFI Group has become the largest transit bus and motor coach manufacturer in North America. It manufactures and sells urban transit buses and inter-city highway coaches along with double-deck buses through five brands (including New Flyer, Motor Coach Industries and others like Alexander Dennis, Plaxton and Arboc) in North America, the United Kingdom and elsewhere around the world.

The company is headquartered in Winnipeg and lists on the Toronto Stock Exchange.

Alex Regiec is a Professional City Planner and author of articles about the bus industry in Manitoba. He spent 28 years as the Operations Planner for Winnipeg Transit, is currently the project manager for the City of Winnipeg’s Transportation Master Plan. He is a director on the Board of the Manitoba Transit Heritage Association. Alex enjoys holiday travels and has toured, researched and enthusiastically ridden on many public transport and bus systems worldwide.