Teche Greyhound Lines


The Teche Greyhound Lines, a highway-coach carrier, was a Greyhound regional operating company, based in New Orleans, Louisiana, USA, from 1934 until 1954, when it was merged into the Southeastern Greyhound Lines, a neighboring operating company.

Correction note: Not named Teche because of a big snake in the region; but, because the Bayou Teche has a snakelike appearance as it meanders through the land curving this way and then that way, similar to snakelike movements.

Origin

The Teche Greyhound Lines began as the Teche Transfer Company, which became incorporated in Louisiana in April 1920 to operate buses between Jeanerette and New Iberia. The firm then began to grow in steps.
In 1929 the Teche Transfer Company became renamed as the Teche Lines, then in 1932 it began to use the hyphenated brand name, trade name, or service name of the Teche-Greyhound Lines, while at first retaining its own corporate name - after it entered into a through-traffic agreement with Greyhound, and after Greyhound began to buy a minority interest in Teche.

Wheeling and dealing

In 1929 the Old South Coach Lines came into existence - to buy a short branch line, between Birmingham and Tuscaloosa, then promptly extended about 93 more miles from Tuscaloosa to Meridian.
The next year, 1930, the Teche Lines bought the Old South Coach Lines, thereby completing its route between New Orleans and Birmingham.
The Old South Lines was a property of John Gilmer, who previously had founded the Camel City Coach Company, based in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, which became the southern half of the National Highway Transport Company, based in Charleston, West Virginia, which became renamed as the Atlantic Greyhound Lines.
In 1933 the Old South Lines started running between Charlotte and Atlanta and between Columbia and Atlanta.
Gilmer’s Old South Lines in 1934 bought the route between Montgomery and Atlanta – from the Hood Coach Lines, which on that route had begun its first service, and which had soon tried to run additional routes between Atlanta and Macon, between Macon and Savannah, and between Macon and Jacksonville via Waycross.
Hood in [November 1934 sold also the latter routes - to the Consolidated Coach Corporation and the Union Bus Company, with the Atlanta-Macon and Macon-Waycross-Jacksonville routes going to Consolidated and with the Macon-Savannah route going to Union - thereby gaining for Consolidated and Union not only a new route between Macon and Savannah and a parallel alternate route between Atlanta and Macon but also a quicker alternate route between Macon and Jacksonville.
After that last sale the Hood firm, no longer holding any other route, went out of business.
In 1935 the Atlantic GL bought the Old South routes to Atlanta from Charlotte and from Columbia, thereby preparing to establish connections in Atlanta with the Teche GL and the Southeastern GL.
In February 1936 Teche bought the Old South route between Montgomery and Atlanta, thereby completing its route between New Orleans and Atlanta.

Background and participation of O.W. Townsend

O.W. Townsend, who in 1932 obtained control of the Teche Lines, had begun in the highway-coach industry in 1924 when he founded the Cornhusker Stage Lines, which in 1927 became a link in the chain of independently owned carriers which operated under the collective name of the YellowaY Lines.
Soon under the YellowaY name Townsend ran his coaches across Nebraska between Chicago and Denver - and maybe onward to Salt Lake City.
In 1928 Townsend sold some of his rights to the newly formed American Motor Transportation Company, which bought also most of the other independent YellowaY member firms, and which then operated them as the YellowaY-Pioneer System.
In 1929 the Motor Transit Corporation bought the Yelloway-Pioneer System, and later in 1929 the MTC became renamed as The Greyhound Corporation.
Townsend in 1929 sold his remaining property in the Cornhusker Stage Lines to the Union Pacific Railroad, which merged it into its new Interstate Transit Lines, which in 1943 began operating under the brand name, trade name, or service name of the Overland Greyhound Lines, and both of which in 1952 became wholly owned subsidiaries of the parent Greyhound firm, then became merged, under the name of the Overland Greyhound Lines, as a division of The Greyhound Corporation.
Meanwhile, even before Townsend sold the remainder of Cornhusker to Interstate, he began another carrier – the Atlantic-Pacific Stages, running between Saint Louis and Los Angeles via Kansas City, Denver, and Albuquerque - which in 1930 he sold to the Interstate Transit, Inc., a completely different firm with a confusingly similar name, operating as the Colonial Stages, which afterward became renamed as the Colonial Atlantic-Pacific Stages, and which succumbed in 1932 during the Great Depression.
In 1931 and 1932 Townsend lived and worked in Philadelphia as the regional manager of the eastern end of the CAPS.
After the second failure of the CAPS, Townsend moved to New Orleans, bought a controlling interest in the Teche Lines, and began making deals with The Greyhound Corporation.

Further developments

About 1934 Greyhound increased its partial ownership of the Teche Lines to a controlling interest, and Greyhound renamed Teche as the unhyphenated Teche Greyhound Lines; then in 1939 Greyhound bought also the last remaining minority interest of Townsend ; and in 1941 Greyhound merged the TGL into itself as a division of the parent Greyhound firm.
By 1954 the TGL ran from New Orleans to Baton Rouge, Natchez, through Hammond to Jackson, through Hattiesburg and Meridian to Birmingham, through Mobile and Montgomery and Columbus to Atlanta, through Mobile to Marianna, and westward through Lafayette to Lake Charles, plus along several regional and feeder routes in the southern part of the Pelican State.
The Teche GL met the Dixie GL to the north, the Southwestern GL to the west, and the Atlantic GL and the Southeastern GL to the east.
The TGL took part in major interlined through-routes - that is, the use of through-coaches on through-routes running through the territories of two or more Greyhound regional operating companies - connecting New Orleans with Los Angeles, Houston, Memphis, Saint Louis, Chicago, Detroit, New York City, Washington, Jacksonville, Miami, and Saint Petersburg.

Merger into Southeastern GL

In October 1954 The Greyhound Corporation merged Teche and a neighboring operating company, the Dixie GL, based in Memphis, Tennessee, into the Southeastern GL, another neighboring regional company, based in Lexington, Kentucky. The three fleets of the three divisions became combined into a single fleet.
Thus ended the Teche GL.

Beyond Teche GL

After that merger the newly expanded Southeastern GL served 12 states along 13,227 route-miles of highways - from Cincinnati, Saint Louis, Memphis, Natchez, Baton Rouge, New Orleans, and Lake Charles - to Savannah and Jacksonville - from the Mississippi River to the Atlantic Ocean and from the Ohio River to the Gulf of Mexico.
In October 1957 The Greyhound Corporation merged also the Florida GL, one more neighboring operating company, based in Jacksonville, Florida, into the SEGL.
In November 1960 The Greyhound Corporation further merged the Atlantic GL, yet another neighboring regional company, based in Charleston, West Virginia, with - not into but rather with - the Southeastern GL, thereby creating the Southern Division of The Greyhound Corporation, the third of four huge new divisions.
Thus ended the Southeastern GL, and thus began the Southern GL.
Later The Greyhound Corporation reorganized again, into just two humongous divisions, named as the Greyhound Lines East and the Greyhound Lines West ; even later it eliminated those two divisions, thus leaving a single gargantuan undivided nationwide fleet.
When the Southern GL came into existence, the headquarters functions became gradually transferred from Lexington, Kentucky, and Charleston, West Virginia, to Atlanta, Georgia; when GLE arose, many of those administrative functions became shifted from Atlanta to Cleveland, Ohio; eventually those functions migrated to Chicago, Illinois, then to Phoenix, Arizona, when The Greyhound Corporation moved its corporate headquarters from Chicago to a new building in Phoenix.
In 1987 The Greyhound Corporation, which had become widely diversified far beyond passenger transportation, sold its entire highway-coach operating business to a new company, named as the Greyhound Lines, Inc., called also GLI, based in Dallas, Texas - a separate, independent, unrelated firm, which was the property of a group of private investors under the promotion of Fred Currey, a former executive of the Continental Trailways, which was the largest member company in the Trailways trade association.
Later in 1987 the Greyhound Lines, Inc., the GLI, the new firm based in Dallas, further bought also the Trailways, Inc., the TWI, its largest competitor, and merged it into the GLI.
The lenders and the other investors of the GLI ousted Fred Currey after the firm went into bankruptcy in 1990.
The GLI has continued to experience difficulties and lackluster performance under a succession of new owners and new executives - while continuing to reduce its level of service - by hauling fewer passengers aboard fewer coaches on fewer trips along fewer routes with fewer stops in fewer communities in fewer states - and by doing so on fewer days - that is, increasingly operating some trips less often than every day - and by using fewer through-coaches, thus requiring passengers to make more transfers.
After the sale to the GLI, The Greyhound Corporation changed its name to the Greyhound-Dial Corporation, then the Dial Corporation, then the Viad Corporation.
The website of the Viad Corporation in September 2008 makes no mention of its corporate history or its past relationship to Greyhound - that is, its origin as The Greyhound Corporation.