School Buses Then vs. Now

As some of you might know, Rohrer Bus has been around for nearly 100 years! Howard E. Rohrer Sr. started transporting kids to school in the early 1920’s, but the school bus industry was very different back then from how it is now…

Our buses weren’t actually buses at all!

We started out transporting kids on a horse-drawn carriage, called a “school hack.” Although motorized carriages entered experimental production in the late 1910’s, the technology was slow to spread to rural PA, and we utilized what we had access to! Nowadays, bus drivers have to be specially trained to drive a larger-than-average vehicle, but back then, “bus drivers” had to learn how to control a creature with a mind of its own!

Hacks didn’t resemble modern school buses, either!

Hacks were designed with benches running along the walls and the children sat facing inwards (not very safe.) They didn’t offer much protection from the weather for kids or the driver, except maybe for some cloth curtains over the windows or a tarp stretched over the top of the wagon. In addition, “school bus yellow” didn’t become a popular safety feature until decades later, so hacks could come in any color, or even be left unpainted.

There weren’t as many kids!

Hacks needed to be small and light enough for one or two horses to pull, so they could only fit a fraction of the students a modern school bus can fit. Think about it- modern school buses are fitted with 200-300 horsepower engines, and hacks relied on the power of just 1-2 horses!

We only operated within a couple miles!

While we are still a family-owned and operated company, we’ve grown quite a bit in the course of nearly 100 years. While we drive in many school districts around central and northeast PA nowadays, we come from very humble beginnings. At the formation of our company, we only transported kids in the little village of Allen’s Cove, just south of our current headquarters in Duncannon, PA!

Perhaps the school bus industry wasn’t COMPLETELY different back then: there was still no need to transport kids to school in the summer! The tradition of schoolkids having summers off dates back hundreds of years ago, when kids would have to stay home over the summers to help their parents tend to their farms. The more you know!

Thanks for reading, and hopefully you learned something new! Calling all driver friends: would you rather be a school bus driver in 2018 or be a “hack driver” 100 years ago? Let us know in the comments!

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