Mid Bus - History

History

In 1980, in the US, there were six major school bus body companies building large school buses, mostly making bodies for chassis from four truck manufacturers, joined by two coach-type school bus builders on the West Coast. Most also made some smaller buses of various types. With the baby boom years which swelled the ranks of school children in the past, the manufacturing industry faced serious over-capacity as companies vied and competed for lower volumes of purchases.

In 1981, when Sheller-Globe Corporation, a diversified industrial conglomerate closed down its large Superior Coach Company bus factory in Lima, Ohio, three former managers created Mid Bus, manufacturing Superior's smallest Type A bus under the new "Superior by Mid Bus" brand name.

Initially, they had a seven other former employees of the large factory, and worked in a small shop. As other small bus products were added, Superior by Mid Bus was shortened to Mid Bus. In the late 1980s, the company acquired the Minuteman product line from AmTran (formerly Ward Body Company) and in the early 1990s, the tooling and product rights to Busette from Wayne Corporation.

After a succession of larger facilities in Lima, around 1995, the company moved to a much larger facility in Bluffton, Ohio. Mid Bus became a subsidiary of Collins Industries, a publicly-traded stock company, in 1998. On September 19, 2007, Collins announced plans to close the Mid Bus plant in Ohio and consolidate all manufacturing at the Collins facility in Kansas.