Central Greyhound Lines is a name used in six different contexts or applications in the intercity highway-coach industry in the USA. In each of the first five instances, the name was used for a regional operating company (that is, a division or subsidiary) of The Greyhound Corporation (the parent Greyhound firm). In the last instance, the name was used for an internal administrative department of the (second) Greyhound Lines, Inc., the (second) GLI, a separate, independent, unrelated firm, after the GLI bought the core bus business of The Greyhound Corporation.
The first GLI The Motor Transit Corporation (MTC), the original Greyhound firm, before it was renamed The Greyhound Corporation, started a new route between Chicago, Illinois, and Indianapolis, Indiana, in February 1927, four months after its formation (as the MTC).
To comply with an Indiana statute (one which required that corporations doing business in the Hoosier State be domiciled there), the MTC had already (in November 1926, the same month as its own incorporation) created a wholly owned subsidiary, based in Indiana and named as the Greyhound Lines, Inc., of Indiana (called also the GLI of Indiana), to conduct the route between Chicago and Indianapolis (mostly in Indiana).
Thereby the GLI of Indiana became the first business unit of the growing Greyhound empire to make a public use of the name of the Greyhound Lines.
The GLI of Indiana also took over another firm, the Blue Goose Lines, running in the Hoosier State from Indianapolis southward to Evansville and northward to Kokomo and onward to Fort Wayne (all four in Indiana), bought from Ralph Bogan and Swan Sundstrom, two original busmen from northern Minnesota. [The two sellers continued as key players at Greyhound. Bogan served eventually as the vice president of The Greyhound Corporation during the presidency of Orville Swan Caesar (1946–56), after the retirement of Carl Eric Wickman, the principal founder of Greyhound; Sundstrom served as a long-time president of the Pennsylvania Greyhound Lines.]
[In November 1926 the MTC created also a sister subsidiary, named as the Greyhound Lines, Inc., of Ohio (the GLI of Ohio), which in November 1927 began service between Detroit, Michigan, and Cincinnati, Ohio.]
[For a short time during 1927–28, there was also a third subsidiary (of the MTC) using the name of the Greyhound Lines, Inc. – the GLI of Delaware, which came into existence to buy the Purple Swan Safety Coach Lines, running between Chicago and Kansas City via Saint Louis (the two latter in Missouri), and which became renamed as the Pickwick-Greyhound Lines, after the Pickwick Corporation bought a one-half ownership interest in that firm (hence the hyphenated name). Later the route segment between Saint Louis and Kansas City became transferred to the Southwestern GL, and the segment between Chicago and Saint Louis became transferred to the Illinois GL (then to the Central GL, then eventually to the Great Lakes GL).]
In 1929 the MTC became renamed as The Greyhound Corporation (with an uppercase T, because the word "the" was an integral part of the legal name of the corporate entity).
The GLI of Indiana and the GLI of Ohio developed additional routes, mostly by buying existing properties.
During the early years of the growth of the Greyhound empire, the GLI of Indiana performed an important function, by operating a number of significant routes before they became transferred to other operating companies.
The first Central GL In 1930 The Greyhound Corporation, the parent Greyhound firm, formed two new regional companies – the Pennsylvania Greyhound Lines (GL) and the (first) Central GL.
The purpose of the Pennsylvania GL was to provide an entity in which the Pennsylvania Railroad (PRR) soon bought a minority interest, a subsidiary in a territory which coincided with the territory of the railway firm – so that the rail company could supplement its train service and substitute bus service in place of some of its unprofitable and marginally profitable passenger trains.
Greyhound then transferred the routes of the GLI of Indiana and the GLI of Ohio to the new companies. The east–west routes went to the Pennsylvania GL, as did the other ones paralleling other lines of the PRR. The remaining routes [that is, those between Evansville and Indianapolis and between Detroit and Cincinnati and onward to Louisville (in Kentucky)] went to the (first) Central GL.
The GLI of Indiana and the GLI of Ohio then went out of existence.
Ohio GL The (first) Central GL in 1935 (five years later) became renamed as the Ohio Greyhound Lines (completely different and separate from the GLI of Ohio, which had gone out of existence in 1930) – to allow Greyhound to reassign the name Central to a new subsidiary, in the Midwest and the Northeast, one in an area which coincided with the territory of another major railway company, the New York Central (NYC) System, one in which Greyhound transferred a minority non-voting interest to the NYC System. The Greyhound executives wished for the latter subsidiary to bear a name (Central) which suggested the kinship with the related railway firm (New York Central), as in the case of the neighboring Pennsylvania GL and the Pennsylvania Railroad.
[For several years during the 1930s, the coaches of the Central GL and the Pennsylvania GL bore (in addition to their usual Greyhound markings) the logos of the related railway companies – the oval (or ellipse) of the NYC System and the keystone of the "Pennsy" Railroad.]
Despite the name of the Ohio GL, the firm was based in Indiana (as had been the GLI of Indiana and the first Central GL), to satisfy the statutory requirement of the Hoosier State for domestic corporations for operations there.
The Ohio GL continued to increase its route network throughout its area, mostly by the acquisition of existing carriers.
The second Central GL Thus the second Central GL came into existence in 1935, based in Cleveland, Ohio, as a subsidiary of The Greyhound Corporation, and it continued until late in 1954, when it was merged into the Pennsylvania GL.
{In the next year, 1955, the enlarged Pennsylvania GL became redesignated as the Eastern Division of The Greyhound Corporation [called also the (second) Eastern GL], the first of four huge new divisions (along with Southern, Western, and another Central).}
The (second) Central GL came from three major components:
first, the former Safety Motor Coach Lines, running from Chicago into Michigan (including the routes between Chicago and Detroit) and throughout the western part of the Lower Peninsula of Michigan;
second, the routes between Chicago and New York City via Cleveland (in Ohio), including the route via Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse, and Albany (all four in the Empire State), paralleling the touted "water-level route" of the New York Central (railway) System [in contrast with the shorter mountainous route of the Pennsylvania Railroad between Chicago and New York City via Fort Wayne (in Indiana), Bucyrus, Mansfield, and Canton (all three in Ohio), and Pittsburgh, Altoona, Harrisburg, and Philadelphia (all four in Pennsylvania)];
third, a large route network throughout upstate New York, with one extension to Montréal, Québec, Canada, and another from Albany to Boston via Pittsfield, Springfield, and Worcester (all the last four in Massachusetts).
The first major part of the (second) Central GL, the Safety Motor Coach Lines, had been founded (with the backing of Wickman) in 1924 by Edwin (Ed) Eckstrom, an accountant, born in Ludington, Michigan, and raised in Hibbing, Minnesota. [Eckstrom in -17 had become an investor and participant in the Mesaba Transportation Company, based in Hibbing, the first incorporated firm (which replaced the Hibbing Transportation Company, a partnership consisting of Eric Wickman, Ralph Bogan, and others) which led to the founding of the Greyhound empire.]
In 1926, after the Motor Transit Corporation (MTC) came into existence, its first purchase was Eckstrom's Safety Motor Coach Lines, and Eckstrom became the first president of the MTC.
[When the MTC bought the Safety Motor Coach Lines, Eckstrom's company contributed to the MTC not only the name Greyhound and the image of a greyhound dog but also the blue-and-white livery (color scheme) used on Eckstrom's coaches. Eckstrom is said to have proposed the use of the name of the Greyhound Lines even before he left (with the support of his associates in Minnesota) to go back eastward. For more details please see the article about the Great Lakes GL.]
In 1929 the Safety Motor Coach Lines (as a subsidiary of the MTC) took over the Interstate Stages (which had used the brand name of the Oriole Lines and had named its coaches as the Oriole Flyers), the Southwestern Michigan Motor Coach Company, and the YellowaY of Michigan (a part of the YellowaY-Pioneer System, bought from the American Motor Transportation Company), all three of which firms Greyhound had acquired through a related company, named as the Automotive Investments, Inc., based in Duluth, Minnesota.
In 1930 the Safety Motor Coach Lines became renamed as the Eastern Greyhound Lines (EGL) of Michigan, then in -35 (briefly) as the (third) Central Greyhound Lines (CGL) of Michigan; then in -36, it merged into the undenominated main (second) Central GL.
[In 1948 Greyhound transferred all the Michigan routes of the (second) Central GL (formerly those of the Safety Motor Coach Lines) to the Great Lakes GL, which had begun in 1941.]
The second major part of the (second) Central GL, the routes between Chicago and New York City via Cleveland, began in 1923, when Clark McConnell, a lawyer in Cleveland, founded the Cleveland-Ashtabula-Conneaut (CAC) Bus Company, running about 71 miles from Cleveland to Conneaut (both in Ohio), reaching to the east-northeast on the way toward Erie, Pennsylvania, and Buffalo, New York.
[McConnell had begun in the bus industry in 1919 by taking part in starting two other firms – the Cleveland-Akron Bus Company and the Cleveland-Elyria-Toledo Bus Company (which latter firm, despite its name, ran from Cleveland only as far as Norwalk, beyond Elyria but short of Toledo); O.B. Baskett, a former driver and sometime manager for those two firms (1919–24), in 1925, after a brief stint in North Carolina, began running coaches of his own in East Tennessee between Knoxville and Johnson City, then in 1928 co-founded the Tennessee Coach Company, which long (1929–56) cooperated (in part by running through-coaches on through-schedules in pool interline operations) with the Atlantic GL, the Dixie GL, and (especially) the Southeastern GL, but which in 1956 became a member of the Trailways association (then named as the National Trailways Bus System), and which in 1966 became a wholly owned subsidiary of the Continental Trailways.]
[While Baskett lived in North Carolina (1924–25), he worked for the Carolina Motor Coaches, which soon became a major part of the newly founded Carolina Coach Company, which in 1940 became a member of the National Trailways association (and thereby became known also as the Carolina Trailways), and which in 1997 became a wholly owned subsidiary of the (second) Greyhound Lines, Inc., the (second) GLI.]
[One curious result of that last step is that now a Greyhound subsidiary (the Carolina Coach Company, the Carolina Trailways) is a member of the Trailways association (now named as the Trailways Transportation System).]
The CAC Bus Company in 1927 extended its route to Buffalo.