This photo from the Allen County Historical Society, a line of new buses produced by the Superior Body Co. for the Lima City Lines approaches downtown Lima in May 1939. “The exterior of the buses is finished in cardinal red and cream with aluminum roofs and wheels while the interiors have an ivory and light green color scheme,” the Lima News reported May 11, 1939.
Courtesy of Allen County Historical Society
A half century ago, aiming to bring some stability to the county’s occasionally chaotic public transportation system, the Allen County Commissioners approved the creation of a regional transit authority.
“The commissioners emphasized, however, the action merely creates an authority for future use,” the Lima News reported September 30, 1974. “No date for appointing a five-member board or putting the authority into effect was discussed.”
Created under provisions of the Ohio Revised Code, the Allen County Regional Transit Authority was an attempt to centralize mass transportation planning within the county and secure federal funding for project implementation, the News wrote in December 2022.
In April 1976, with Lima’s bus service again in peril under a private operator, the city turned over its operation to the RTA. “City officials and representatives from the Allen County Regional Transit Authority have formally signed an agreement permitting the RTA to assume management duties of the city’s bus system on Saturday,” the News wrote April 23, 1976. The agreement was to be temporary.
Nearly a century earlier, the city’s first public transportation arrived in the form of a horse-drawn trolley, which made its way down Main Street on an August afternoon in 1878, its coming announced by a man on horseback, waving his hat like Paul Revere, and, according to an account in the Allen County Democrat, informing “the excited crowd on the corner that ‘the street cars had come!’
“It was even so,” the newspaper continued, “for in a few minutes they made their appearance, coming down Main Street, loaded down with small boys hanging on the back steps, and (George) Jameson and two or three stockholders on the front step, looking as proud and happy as a boy with a new red wagon.”
By 1886, the shiny red wagon was losing its gloss. With the horse-drawn trolley failing to attract many riders because of spotty service, Lima businessman and benefactor Benjamin Faurot decided it was time for the city to turn to the newly invented, speedier and more reliable electric streetcar. “So,” the News wrote in December 2018, “the track used by the horse-drawn street cars was pulled up and new rails for an expanded, citywide, electrified system was put down.” It was, according to some sources, the first electric trolley system west of the Alleghenies.
For the next half century, the electric trolley cars connected Lima residents with the downtown shops and the factories of south Lima while providing a connection for travelers between the train stations just north of downtown and the Erie station on South Main Street.
The beginning of the end for the trolleys came just before midnight on a Saturday in October 1937 when a Lima City Street Railway car made its final run on the West Market Street route. “The last ride was occasion for a celebration much like the old-fashioned affair of more than 50 years (ago) when Lima’s first horse-less streetcar was placed in operation over the same line,” the News wrote October 3, 1937.
The following day, a 25-passenger bus, also operated by the Lima City Street Railway Co., began operation on West Market Street. The remainder of the streetcar routes were phased out on May 13, 1939. “The following morning, the Lima City Lines began bus operation,” the News wrote June 16,1999. “A second parade in as many days was held downtown to herald the new buses.”
Buses, however, had been prowling Lima’s streets since at least 1914. “Motor car No. 1, of the Lima Motor Transit company has arrived in the city and is on exhibition at the Central garage,” the News announced April 3, 1914. “The motor bus is the first of a set of four, each with a capacity of thirty passengers which will be put in service soon on the city streets, augmenting the rather inadequate city streetcar service by tapping sections of the city which the local cars do not reach.”
The new means of transportation, which debuted on Lima’s streets in mid-April 1914, “means more to the city’s development than any project since the first days of the electric streetcars,” an ad in the Lima Republican-Gazette proclaimed. The Lima Motor Transit Co. survived only a few years.
Although buses no longer ran regular routes in Lima, routes connecting the city with outlying towns sprung up. “Because of the number of people who began to work in Lima, who lived in other areas adjacent to the city, motor bus lines were begun which served Harrod, Lafayette, Alger, Kenton, Marion and that area,” local historian John Keller wrote in the 1976 history of Allen County.
In Lima, so called jitney buses, smaller privately owned vehicles that carried passengers over a regular route usually for a fare of a nickel (jitney was slang for a nickel) began appearing around 1915. In February 1917, a jitney bus carrying 16 workmen home from their jobs at the Ohio Steel Foundry was struck by a train at the Fourth Street railroad crossing, killing five of the men.
Meanwhile, the bus service introduced in 1937 found itself in financial difficulty by 1950 as residents abandoned the bus for the private automobile. In 1951, the service was reorganized and despite, the News wrote in December 2022, “several fare and service adjustments,” continued to struggle through the 1950s and ‘60s and required reorganization again in 1966.
“Established in 1966, the Lima Bus Company continued public transit operations until 1972 when, due to erratic service and increased fares, transit service was transferred to the Lima Bus Service, a private company franchised by the City of Lima,” the News wrote.
Predictably, the bus line struggled and by May 1976 the city was advertising for a “transit operator” to take over the city bus line and replace the RTA, which in April had agreed to operate the buses temporarily.
This month, as it marks 50 years of existence, the RTA still operates the buses, overseeing eight routes in Lima as well as routes from Lima to Bluffton and Lima to Delphos. On Saturdays in July and August, a seasonal loop route serves downtown. More than 212,000 people rode RTA buses in 2023.
In October 1998, the county unveiled a new $825,000 Regional Transit Authority bus transfer center at the corner of High Street and Central Avenue. “The center, paid for with federal, state and local tax dollars, is a stark contrast to the old, cramped transfer center at Central Avenue and North Street,” the News wrote October 3, 1998.
SOURCE
This feature is a cooperative effort between the newspaper and the Allen County Museum and Historical Society.
LEARN MORE
See past Reminisce stories at limaohio.com/tag/reminisce
Reach Greg Hoersten at [email protected].
