Tranquility Intertown Transit Service

Digging through unused photos from this past year yielded not only the 1963 Walter we saw yesterday, but also this Model AA transit bus that made a quick stop here at Hemmings back in September on the way to a Model A show in New Hampshire. I’d actually seen it once before, at the NSRA show in York, Pennsylvania, last year, but never had a chance to get details on it then. As I was able to find out when he stopped, Bruce Acheson of Highland Lakes, New Jersey, built the entire bus, nearly by hand. In 2000, he bought the Model AA chassis, which once supported a school bus body, from Arizona, then spent the next three years building the transit bus body from scratch. When done with that, the AA tipped the scales at about 9,000 pounds – far more weight than the stock four-cylinder was capable of lugging – so he swapped in a 351 Windsor to power the bus.

As far as the lettering along the side, Bruce’s partner-in-crime, Bill McGeehan, lives in Tranqulity, New Jersey, so Bruce and Bill created the fictionalized route that passed through every town between Highland Lakes and Tranquility. They also appropriately named the line the Tranquility Intertown Transit Service, with its own custom logo, proving that juvenile subliminal humor is worth a chuckle, no matter what your age.