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New bus company seeks to fill Blue and White void
Sunday, February 11, 2001 By Tom Gibb, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
ALTOONA -- This wouldn't seem to be a place that would offer much courage to an entrepreneur looking to start up a bus line.
It was, after all, home to Blue and White Bus Lines Inc., an 81-year-old local fixture that collapsed last summer in a tangle of tragedy and financial ruin.
In November 1999, a crash killed a passenger and a driver during a charter trip carrying Penn State University students home from a holiday outing in New York City. The federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration said three of six buses in the caravan weren't fit to be on the road. The company subsequently found insurance priced beyond its means.
In August, Blue and White shut down, filed for bankruptcy and left soured customers holding worthless charter passes.
It's not an inspiration, to be sure.
But here comes local trucking company owner Baxter Caldwell, starting his own charter motor coach business from scratch, placing a start-up order for six new, luxury buses stocked with enough optional safety features and other gear that he's driving the sticker price up about 30 percent.
The company has been six months in the making, and by late next month, the newly christened Fantasy Land Cruises, using none of Blue and White's old gear but a few of its ex-employees, expects to set out with the first of its charter tours.
Fantasy Land is booking tours to such standard group travel stops as Atlantic City, N.J.; New York City; Williamsburg, Va.; and Branson, Mo., touting its schedule in brochures and travel agency listings.
The company also figures it is tapping ready-made interest by pitching its tours to a list of 16,000 former Blue and White customers, some of whom signed on regularly for Blue and White tours and were left looking for a replacement when that company folded.
Fantasy Land rolled out its tour schedule during a recent session at the Holiday Inn in Monroeville, one of several get-acquainted sessions with former Blue and White customers.
Blue and White wound up with a fleet of 30 buses. How large Caldwell's fleet grows depends on how much business he lands, he said.
"We feel that the business is being taken care of, but as with anything else, there's always room for competition," said Loretta Fullington, tour manager with Fullington Auto Bus Co. of Clearfield, a 102-year-old line with 55 motor coaches.
"Is there room for them? In our area, oh, yes," said John Stoner, an owner of Swinston Travel Inc., an agency with offices in Johnstown, Somerset and Bedford.
Fantasy Land is getting a lot of second looks with such features as on-board food service and individually controlled, multichannel audio entertainment centers at every seat, Stoner said. "It's state of the art."
Caldwell said he went shopping mostly for safety features, though, not glitz.
He's president of 30-year-old Blair America Inc., an Altoona-based interstate trucking company, and figured he'd try his hand at the bus business.
"I found, though, that the safety rules the federal government has for hauling a load of boxes is tougher than what they have for hauling a load of people," Caldwell said.
So he adopted some trucking standards to the bus business. Among them: Doppler radar, which warns of other objects lurking ahead in rain or fog; video cameras to give the driver a better view when backing up; and more conspicuous reflective markings across the bus exteriors.
The buses will carry forward-looking cameras linked to digital recorders, Caldwell said, "so that if something happens, we'll know what happened."
"If, God forbid, I ever have to sit on a witness stand, I want to know that I did more than the minimum," he said.
The extras tacked about $130,000 onto the $420,000 price of his buses. But Caldwell said his business plan called for him to make it up "at 4 to 5 cents more per person on a trip."
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