A unique, 97-year-old bus with ties to Lansing is undergoing significant repairs in the hopes that it will run again.
Its chassis was built by the now defunct REO Motor Car Company around 1928, said Jim Snell, executive director of the Tri-County Regional Planning Commission.
Snell said he stumbled across the bus online. A retired couple in Southern California owned and planned to restore it, but the bus’s condition means a lot of time and professional repairs have to go into it.
The couple let the commission have the bus, and it was transported all the way to Michigan. But that’s just the beginning of the bus’s journey, he said.
“It’s going to move off to a place in Pennsylvania that specializes in this kind of restoration,” Snell said. “We want to kind of bring it back to life.”
The bus is likely one of the last of its kind, Snell said.
Before ending up in California, it was housed in a barn in Arizona, which is likely the reason it still exists, Snell said.
It evaded being turned into scrap metal during World War II and avoided harsh winters and salty roads, he said.
“If somebody hid it away or was in somebody's barn somewhere, it was far out of reach enough that it managed to survive all of that,” Snell said. “The fact that it still looks like it did 100 years ago, I think is the coolest part. It's almost like a ghost."
The only parts missing from the bus are the front radiator and seats. The structure of the bus is made of wood and is protected by the layer of metal, he said.
The bus will be undergoing renovations in Pennsylvania for up to two years. The hope is once that’s done the bus will return to Lansing and be drivable, he said.
"We want something the public can interact with, to show that years ago Lansing was doing some good work and it's still out there today," Snell said.
During the summer, the commission hope to drive the bus around and bring it to community events. If it’s unable to run again, they will still be able to showcase this piece of Lansing’s history in a different way, he said.
“It's a bridge between the industrial history of the past and the quality of the workmanship that was done in town 100 years ago,” Snell said.
Snell said the Tri-County Regional Planning Commission is trying to figure out what the bus was used for and encourages anyone with potential information to contact them.