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MSU-Northern
Alum Restores Glacier's Red Buses
Fall
2002
Dennis
Schwecke proudly stands next to one of Glacier Park's newly restored
red touring buses. |
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In
the summer of 1996, MSU-Northern automotive graduate Dennis Schwecke
spent a day taking in the scenery of Glacier National Park. Rather
than white-knuckle the Going-to-the-Sun Road himself, he climbed into
one of the park's vintage red tour buses and let someone else do the
driving. A native Montanan, he found the cliffs and summits, the flora
and fauna and flowing waters leaving a glorious imprint on his mind.
However,
so did the chugging of the worn out bus he rode. The other red buses
they passed appeared equally as fatigued to Schwecke, who graduated
in 1989. |
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Now
working for Ford Motor Company in Detroit, he proposed to his superiors
the idea of rehabilitating Glacier National Park's Red Bus fleet.
"I thought that converting the Ford engines that were already
in the buses to run on natural gas or propane would reflect well
on both Ford and the Park," says Schwecke. Unfortunately, no
"off-the-shelf" parts existed to do the conversion, and
Glacier Park Inc. (GPI), owners of the buses at the time, were not
interested. Schwecke, however refused to shelve the idea.
In
1999, he visited the park again, this time meeting with the Red
Bus fleet's new chief mechanic, Larry Hegg. "We became friends,
and Larry was quite enthused about rehabbing the buses, so we worked
together to generate interest." While they were developing
support for the project, GPI was forced to retire the old buses
altogether - the fatigued frames and too many years of repair and
replacement had rendered them unsafe for public use. "Now,"
Schwecke says, "GPI was very interested in getting them refurbished,
so I sent a note to Bill Ford at Ford Motor Company outlining
our ideas. Mr. Ford was interested, and asked some of our management
to look into it."
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Coincidentally,
the National Park Service was creating the "Proud Partner Program"
at about the same time. This was intended to partner our parks with
select corporations to work on solving problems that confront them.
Ford was eager to become the transportation partner to the parks,
and the Red Buses seemed an ideal place to start. Ford agreed to
fund a feasibility study, and a bus was driven from Glacier to Detroit
in February of 2000.
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On
of the red touring buses in July |
Schwecke
was involved in the study and later in the construction of a prototype
bus, acting as a liaison and "cheerleader". "Since my day
job involves developing diagnostic software and not antique bus renovation,
it involved a lot of lunch hours and evenings," he says. "The
prototype was successful, and all parties were now quite enthusiastic."
The total
process from beginning to end took two years and more than 200 experts
from at least six organizations. The buses' historical integrity has been
maintained as much as possible. The size, shape, and of course color remain
the same. The windows also maintain their original size and shape, even
though the first ones were hand-cut and all slightly different sizes.
Finally, Schwecke's dream of transforming Glacier National Park's historical
buses had been realized. On June 8th, 2002, he attended a homecoming ceremony,
when twenty of them arrived home to Glacier Park, ready to get back to
the work they'd been doing for more than 60 years. "The ceremony
was a huge success," he says, "although we could have done without
the four feet of snow that fell in East Glacier that weekend."
Thanks
to Dennis Schwecke's never-say-die attitude and Ford Motor Company's ingenuity
and resourcefulness, Glacier National Park's almost forsaken fleet of
old red buses has returned. They are a winsome symbol of the park's
history - and now a state-of-the-art model of economic and environmentally-friendly
transportation.
One of
the restored red buses
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