Virginia Overland Transportation - Bus Dealerships

Bus Dealerships

Virginia Overland operated several bus dealerships serving primarily Virginia and North Carolina, most notably a franchise for Wayne Corporation which delivered over 2,000 new school and commercial buses between 1976 and 1990. More than a few of Wayne's dealerships were operated by school bus contractors. ARA Transportation and Laidlaw were the largest. Others included Bus and Bodies of Plaistow, New Hampshire, Town & Country Transportation of Warren, Rhode Island, Rohrer of Duncannon, Pennsylvania, and School Bus Services of Shawnee Mission, Kansas. These school bus contractors, several of whom were also involved in contracting paratransit services, found having a dealership provided both a source and an input to product design at Wayne, as well as a natural outlet for sale of surplus equipment at the end of contract periods.

Wayne Corporation and Virginia Overland each enjoyed some especial profitable years in the late 1970s, buoyed by sales of Wayne's revolutionary Busette, a small school bus based upon the then-new cutaway van chassis which since have become a staple of the small school bus, recreational vehicle, and smaller delivery truck markets in the U.S. A higher-headroom version of the Busette, named Transette, also did very well in both the Virginia and national markets during this time.

In the 1980s, U.S. school bus body manufacturers faced a serious decline in sales of conventional school buses as both the bubble in school populations resulting from the baby boom generation and the era of court-ordered desegregation school busing each passed.

As did many other school bus body dealers in the U.S., in the early 1980s, Virginia Overland diversified its products lines from handling only Wayne products to representing additional franchised product lines, including small school buses by Mid Bus, based in Lima, Ohio, and smaller and mid-sized commercial buses produced by Champion Bus Incorporated of Imlay City, Michigan, as well as adding dealerships for several manufacturers of wheelchair lifts and accessories. However, by the late 1980s, despite major concessions by its labor union, the future business outlook at Wayne Corporation, Virginia Overland's primary franchiser, had become bleak. The company operating the factory was forced to declare bankruptcy and was liquidated in 1992.

Including the new buses from Wayne, Virginia Overland sold approximately 3,000 new and used buses and vans to its customers between 1976 and 2004 from its dealership locations in Henrico County, Petersburg, Hopewell and Richmond.