WMATA 6481

The Truck and Coach Division of General Motors (GMC) built over 44,000 "New Look" buses beginning in 1958 and continuing to 1977 in the U.S. and 1985 in Canada. The "New Look" buses were also called "fishbowl" buses because of their angled windshields. The buses featured lightweight aluminum construction and good visibility for the driver due to the windshield design. The GM "New Look" bus was the most popular transit bus of its era. GM offered "New Look" buses in many variations including 29-foot, 35-foot and 40-foot lengths, transit and suburban configurations and through four "generations." No. 6481 is a model TDH-5304 bus indicating the following: T - Transit D – Diesel engine H - Hydraulic transmission 53 - 53 seat, 40-foot length 04 – series 4 D.C. Transit was formed in 1956 and was owned by O. Roy Chalk to take over the bus and streetcar operations of Capital Transit. To replace older buses during the 1950s and 1960s, D.C. Transit acquired hundreds of General Motors “New Look” buses including Nos. 6400 – 6499 in 1964. In 1973, Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (Metro) acquired the D.C. Transit system. Metro had been formed in 1967 to build a subway system. The bus operations acquired in 1973 became known as Metrobus. In the early 1980s, No. 6481 was among a group of buses leased to New York City during a shortage of equipment. In 1983 the 6400 series buses along with some other Metrobus “New Look” coaches were rebuilt by the Blitz Bus and Truck Company of Chicago. Blitz rebuilt the drive train, suspension and running gear and applied a new, red, white and blue interior and exterior paint scheme. No. 6481 continued running until its retirement about 2000. Upon retirement, a collector bought No. 6481 at auction and stored it in Richmond, VA. No. 6481 came to Seashore in 2004. In 2010, Seashore installed the exhibit “A Seat for Everyone” inside the bus. The exhibit highlights the role of transit in the history of civil rights. An exhibit panel describes Freedom Riders on buses during the 1960s. Other panels reproduce drawings done by students from the King Middle School in Portland, ME that based on the biography, Claudette Colvin: Twice Towards Justice by Phillip Hoose. Colvin was a teenager who refused to surrender her seat to a white woman on a Montgomery, AL bus in defiance of Jim Crow laws at the time. Seashore selected No. 6481 for this exhibit because the first “Freedom Ride” had started in Washington, DC and the bus entered service in Washington in 1964, the year that the Civil Rights Act was enacted in the nation’s capital.