Red Jammers are the vintage White Motor Company/Bender Body Company Model 706 buses used at Glacier National Park in the United States to transport park visitors since 1936. While the buses are called reds for their distinctive livery, painted to match the color of ripe mountain ash berries, the bus drivers are called jammers because of the sound the gears made when the driver shifts on the steep roads of the park. The "jamming" sound came from the unsynchronized transmissions, where double-clutching was required to shift gears prior to a 1989 retrofit that added automatic transmissions.
Design
The White Motor Company Model 706 chassis with a White 16A 6-cylinder engine and body by Bender Body Company outperformed its competition during a group test at Yosemite National Park in California in 1935, leading to that model's selection by the National Park Service. The distinctive vehicles, with roll-back canvas convertible tops, were styled by noted industrial designer Alexis de Sakhnoffsky, with credit for mechanical design to F.W. Black (president of White Motor Co.) and Herman Bender (Bender Body Co.). The flathead-6 White 16A engine and chassis was already being used for intercity and transit service; the canvas top had featured in the earlier White Model 614 buses, first built for Yellowstone since 1931. Some of the later buses built used the White Type 20 engine.
Each of the Red Jammers built for Glacier accommodated seventeen passengers on four four-abreast bench seats (plus one in front, next to the driver), with five doors on the right-hand (curb) side of the vehicle for passengers and one door on the left for the driver; there were four forward and one reverse speeds that required double-clutching to shift between them, with a top speed of approximately . The mechanical brakes were prone to overheating and downhill speeds were controlled by engine braking, downshifting to third with a top speed of . The White 706 also was available as a fourteen-passenger model, as operated in Yellowstone, omitting the rearmost bench seat in favor of a luggage compartment, distinguishable by the deletion of the rearmost curbside door and the presence of metal bars on the rearmost side windows and backlight.
The body and trim colors were unique to the park in which they operated.
History
Transportation in Glacier was originally established in 1913 using stagecoaches, but their reliability was poor due to the primitive roads and alpine weather; Walter White floated the idea of using his company's vehicles instead to Louis Hill, who had developed the park's master tourism plan in 1914, and Roe Emery's Glacier Park Transportation Company started an evaluation period that summer with ten 11-passenger buses, five 7-passenger touring cars, and two trucks supplied by White Motor Company. Although the capacity of the buses was overstated and offered primitive protection from the elements, they displaced the stagecoach operation later that summer, and Hill signed an exclusive agreement with White Motor Company to provide buses to Glacier. The original 1914 buses were retrofitted with improved bodies, and new buses were ordered and delivered between 1925 and 1927 after the original buses had aged.
White Model 706
The completion of Going-to-the-Sun Road in 1933 forced GPTC to order new buses, as the existing fleet could not traverse Logan Pass. GPTC chose the new White Model 706 along with several other parks; 35 White 706 buses were manufactured for Glacier and delivered between 1936 and 1939, at a cost of each. Glacier National Park still operates 33 of their original buses today in Glacier National Park, Montana, United States, where they are referred to as Red Jammers.
The Volkswagen Type 2 was considered as a replacement for the Red Jammers in 1956; the Type 2s, which were then in use at Banff National Park, were rejected for lacking air conditioning and having weak engines.
One of Glacier's "missing" buses still survives to this day. The park keeps no. 78 stored in original condition at its headquarters in West Glacier. No. 100 was wrecked beyond repair during a fatal accident that occurred early in the morning of June 27, 1977; parts taken from no. 100 are used as decorate Jammer Joe's Cafe at the Lake McDonald Lodge.