The Luxury Trail

When intercity buses last year matched the railroads in total passenger miles for the first time in U.S. history, no one was less surprised than a burly, blue-eyed Texan named Maurice Edwin Moore. As president of Transcontinental Bus System, Inc., Moore, 51, has built one of the nation's fastest-growing businesses on the proposition that as far as mass transportation by land is concerned, the bus is the wave of the future.

Starting with a cow-town Texas line during World War II, Moore in the past 19 years has pieced together Transcontinental's operating subsidiary, Continental Trailways, and built it into the second largest U.S. bus system, with 53,000 miles of routes in 34 states. Compared with the top dog in the bus business, giant Grey hound, Continental is still a pup, but it is growing at a rate to give Greyhound pause. Last week, while Greyhound was reporting a 2.5% increase in its 1961 operating revenues (to $334 million), Continental announced that its revenues had jumped 11% from $45 million to $50 million. Even more impressive, Continental's 1961 profits soared by 42.6% to $3,000,000.

Assembling an Octopus. Moore, who bosses his expanding empire from a foam-rubber bus seat ("It's the best desk chair I've found") in Continental's Dallas head quarters, started out at 18 as a ticket agent in the Little Rock bus depot. In those days the U.S. bus business consisted largely of a patchwork of local companies that seldom traveled more than a few towns down the road. Recalls Moore: "In my first year a man wanted to buy a ticket to Dallas. I told him he couldn't get there by bus." But Moore learned quickly. In 1943 he bought Fort Worth's Bowen Motor Coaches with the help of a group of backers and soon decided that "the more miles of route you've got, the more miles you've got to spread your overhead out on." In 1945 he am bitiously renamed the line Continental Trailways and set out to get those miles.

Because Greyhound had a virtual monopoly of existing long-haul interstate routes and the ICC was unwilling to franchise new ones, Moore was obliged to build up his system by buying small local bus lines in a careful pattern that linked them into new long-haul routes. Octopus-like, Continental stretched its tentacles across the Southeast and into the Midwest; by 1953 the company had its first transcontinental route (it now operates five). At that point Moore found that his fledgling system lacked the equipment to capitalize on the bus industry's greatest potential asset: the growing U.S. network of superhighways.

To remedy this, Moore tried to buy copies of Greyhound's popular big Scenicruiser. But General Motors, which manufactures the Scenicruiser, turned him away. The Scenicruiser dies, explained G.M., belonged to Greyhound, and would be all tied up on Greyhound production for years to come. Undaunted, Moore ordered his engineers to design a big new bus of their own. Then he went ahead and lined up a Belgian firm to build them, and by 1957 had the first of his flashy new Eagle buses on the road.

Plus a Red Carpet. Workhorse of Continental's new fleet is the Silver Eagle, a 40-ft., 46-passenger bus in which everybody but the driver sits 8 ft. above road level, free to survey the countryside without being distracted by passing traffic. Currently, Continental has 250 Silver Eagles, with 22 more due for delivery this month.

On his express routes, in keeping with his belief that it is pampering within and a panoramic view without that lures passengers into buses, Moore uses 50 Golden Eagles--a red-carpeted version of the Silver Eagle that adds a nine-seat, glassed-in lounge at the rear and a pert hostess who promises refreshments (no liquor) and cold snacks "as soon as the bus is out of town." Even more posh is the 64-passenger Super Golden Eagle, a 60-ft. monster, hinged in the middle to bend it safely around curves. So far, however, the Super Golden Eagle's length bars it from highways in all but 18 Western states.

Continental's added touches inevitably add to its ticket costs; for Golden Eagle service passengers pay a surcharge that amounts to $7 on a transcontinental trip. But Moore argues that "people who ride the bus just because it is cheap are no longer a major factor in our business. If you ride buses today, you see a lot of fur coats."

Gaps in the Puzzle. Besides luxury, Continental offers its passengers ever-faster service over the nation's new limited-access highways. Its buses, for example, beat all trains but the crack Broadway Limited between New York and Pittsburgh.

Beyond its own fast-growing routes Continental offers through-service speed as a member of National Trailways Bus System, an association of 44 bus companies that pool equipment to keep a passenger on a single fast bus even though it moves over the routes of several members. But Moore is rapidly gobbling up his association kinfolk; 15 National Trailways members are now wholly owned Continental subsidiaries. "Each company fits in somewhere," says Moore. "It's like a jigsaw puzzle." And so far as Moore is concerned, all the pieces are not yet in place. Continental, he notes pointedly, has not yet penetrated the lucrative Florida market or the New England and Canadian border states.

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