Ralph Cantos Collection
Los Angeles Transit Lines bus #6339 poses for the camera at Exposition Park in 1990.
From Ralph Cantos:
It is the last known surviving example of the 300 bus order that NATIONAL CITY LINES / LATL unleashed on the streetcar loving-citizens of Los Angeles. These buses were used to replace streetcars on rail lines A - D - U and all the shuttle car lines. These GM 4506's were also used to replace older gasoline powered "brand X" buses that LATL inherited from LARY.
Ralph Cantos Collection
Duncan Still
March 4, 2013
Ugh!
Ralph Cantos
March 4, 2013
UGH !!…UGH WHAT ???
Ralph Cantos
March 4, 2013
UGH!…UGH WHAT???
Duncan Still
March 4, 2013
“ugh” refers to the subject of this photo, the vile machine that destroyed our LARY streetcars, polluted our air, and added to traffic congestion. I’ll never lose my resentment for buses (and I’ll never dignify them by calling them “motor coaches”.
Ralph Cantos
March 4, 2013
Duncan, I can undersand your point of view. As a young “trolley fan” growing up in LA , I cried when I saw the Hollywood cars at Terminal Island. I thought the Hollywood cars were the most beautiful streetcar ever built. I HATED BUSES!!! I even hated bus drivers. I carried that hate with me for many years UNTIL I saw buses being scrapped. I felt really bad about what I saw. Later on in life I came to see the bus as “a missed used instrument of progress”. Buses should be used to “feed streetcar lines, NOT EAT THEM”. But National City Lines, and Jessie Haugh and their likes, used buses for their own personal and financial gain,and they used the buses to do it! These people did not GIVE A DAMN about anything or anyone. General Motors just happened to build the best mouse trap, because they had the money to do it. In 1983, when the SCRTD took delivery of 900 new RTS’s ( A PIECE OF SHIT BUS), 900 old and new look buses were driven under their own power to a scrap yard in South LA , and what I saw there was as bad, as anything I saw as a kid at Terminal Island.
Ralph Cantos
March 4, 2013
one last comment. Today I look at “older buses” as big old antique cars of sort. By automotive production standards, some buses are VERY RARE! ONLY 1000 SCENICRUISER’s were built for Greyhound. Only 800 “Silversides” were built. I have a 1957 MACK suburban bus in my collection that ONLY 35
Ralph Cantos
March 4, 2013
comment continued..Only 35 of thsee suburban MACK’s were built. Only 3 are known to survive. It these production numbers were applied to a 1957 automobile, the value of such a car would be priceless. What I saw at that So. LA bus junk yard can only be discribed as A CARNAGE!
Bob Davis
March 4, 2013
This discussion reminds me of the 1960s, during a period when my first wife would leave our daughters at my parents’ home in Monrovia when she went to work. I would get a ride to “the old homestead” and, after visiting a bit, we’d walk down to Huntington drive to catch the #64 RTD bus to Duarte. Sometimes an “old look” bus (similar to 6339) would be assigned to this line, and one of the girls would spot it and say, “Look, Daddy, a ROUND BUS!” The Niles Canyon Railroad sometimes has an “old look” bus running shuttle service between their western terminal and the nearest BART station. 50 years ago, I thought I’d never see the day when a GM 6-71 engine sounded “nostalgic”.
Ralph Cantos
March 5, 2013
the antique historic buses used on the Nies Canyon shuttle belong to the Pacific Bus Museum .
Jim Gannon
March 5, 2013
Great photo of 6339 Ralph. . couldn’t agree more about the RTS. We had the first at Long Beach and the second day out, I put it on the sidewalk at Pacific and Ocean when the steering pump when out. . .our old 3612′s didn’t rattle as much as the RTS did with those plug doors.