The ghost buses of Sandon, B.C.

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Nearly any child knows the feeling. You stop on a road trip and walk into some dim and dusty space, shelves filled with relics from long ago. The floorboards creak beneath your feet, the faded labels show products long missing from daily use. Sometimes the experience grows boring to a young and restless mind, but there’s still a hushed respect. This is the way people once lived, and you sense the ghosts still lingering behind.

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An hour and a half from Nelson, B.C., in the heart of the Kootenay mountains, I climb the creaking steps, walk to the back, and take a seat on a green vinyl bench. This machine has long ceased its motion; it is weatherbeaten and immobile, a shipwreck on wheels. But you can still sense it. That long ago gentle rocking motion as the bus pulled away from the stop. The hiss of tires on rain-slicked streets and neon signs flashing past. The faces of your fellow riders, strangers, yes, but still familiar. A passenger, on your way from here to there.

This is a Brill trolley bus, one of a dozen or so to have found its home in the strangest of places. There’s little need for mass transit in the tiny town of Sandon, B.C. From a height of 5,000 residents at its peak in the 1920s, only a handful remain today. It’s a ghost town, with a preserved general store, hydroelectric generator, city hall, and a few of the original buildings.

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A massive steam locomotive doesn’t look out of place in this old-timey frontier down, but a bunch of postwar buses do. They cluster together like pupating caterpillars, all flaking paint and slightly battered bodywork. And yet, they are also all shockingly complete. The names on the destination indicator are familiar to any Vancouver resident: the 16 Renfrew bus, the number 20 running along Arbutus.

Most of these routes still exist, now served by modern low-floor buses with extending ramps. The buses of 2022 are more sensible and accessible, but there’s more to these relics of the past than their art deco charm.

The first Brill went into service in Vancouver on August 16, 1948. A few years earlier, the BC Electric Railway had begun decommissioning its streetcars in an effort dubbed the “rails to rubber” program. BCER was at first the parent company of BC Hydro, and the hydroelectric plants at Stave and Buntzen lakes were built to power electrified transportation for the citizens of B.C.

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If you’ve ever experienced the smell of a gasoline-powered vehicle from the late 1940s or early 1950s, let alone a diesel truck from that period, you can see how a fleet of electrified trolley buses was infinitely preferable. Internal combustion-powered buses were also part of the plan, but these required a little more skill in changing gears and so on. When you look at modern efforts to electrify urban mobility solutions, the city planners of 1948 were quite forward thinking.

The move was a considerable investment in city infrastructure. Each Brill T44 cost $21,000, roughly $275,000 in today’s money. The T44 designation indicates seating — 44 seats — and later the larger T48 made up the bulk of the fleet.

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These were Canadian-made buses. Built under license by Canadian Car and Foundry of Thunder Bay, the Brill T44 and T48 were a postwar example of the biblical “swords beaten into ploughshares.” During wartime, Car and Foundry was responsible for building about 10 per cent of all Allied Hawker Hurricane fighter aircraft. (As an aside, the factory was run by the pioneering aircraft engineer Elsie MacGill — dubbed Queen of the Hurricanes for her efforts — whose indomitable spirit can best be expressed by pointing out that she commuted to work in a manual transmission Ford Model A despite having to wear leg braces from a bout with polio.)

By January of 1954, Vancouver had 327 trolley buses, the largest fleet in Canada. But into the 1960s and 1970s, what had been a revolution in city transit became just a bunch of old buses. New Flyer trolley buses arrived and began replacing Brills as the latter wore out. Often the new chassis cannibalized the old buses’ powertrains.

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By 1984, the last of the Brills had taken its final passenger to their destination. Next stop, terminal station. Almost all of the buses were sold off for scrap. A couple were later saved and restored by the Transit Museum Society of British Columbia.

But they never made it to the scrapyard. The details are fuzzy, but the contract to buy the Brills and shred them for raw materials ran into some sort of snag. Instead of the crusher, they sat in a yard, mouldering.

For local transit enthusiasts, this was a pretty big problem. In the city, left in an unsupervised yard, the buses were easy targets for metal thieves and vandals. After such a long service life, they deserved better. Another deal was struck, this time with the caretaker of Sandon’s relics, a man named Hal Wright.

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A half dozen Brills were shipped up here, and more soon followed from various cities. In the 2000s, a plan was hatched to restore the buses and repaint them in various colours to represent the provinces. But that fell through too, and today they are just a curiosity in a small town, off the beaten path.

The ghost buses of Sandon have driven their final mile. Tourists come and go, snapping selfies for their Instagram pages, making a stopover on their way to Nelson or Nakusp or some lakeside camping spot in the Kootenays.

But if you sit quietly, you can still sense the thousands of travelers these machines carried. The ordinary lives they were a daily part of, rain and shine, winter and summer. The gliding to a stop. The clunk of the doors swinging open. A friendly nod to the driver, and out you stepped. Home again.