Curbside Classic: 1951 Kenworth “Bruck” – Custom Shuttle Bus

While digging around in the depths of my digital photo albums for CC worthy oddities, I rediscovered this custom commissioned 1951 Kenworth I found on display outside of the Whitefish, Montana Amtrak station. I can’t add much beyond rephrasing what is known about this machine from the historical marker, which you can read in full here.

The curious “Bruck” name is less mysterious when you realize it is the words “bus” and “truck” smooshed together. It was used between 1951 and 1972 by the Great Northern Railway to replace a defunct short line railway connecting the small town of Whitefish to the larger town of Kalispell, Montana. After national passenger service was federalized under Amtrak, the Bruck was retired and soon found itself in long term outdoor storage at a train scrapyard.

A digitized copy of an article from the November 6th, 2000 edition of the Daily Inter Lake newspaper did contain this photo of the truck before its restoration. That source is how we know it had a 10 speed transmission hooked up to a 220 horsepower engine of unknown displacement. That would have made this 39 foot long vehicle reasonably quick for a commercial vehicle in 1951. Surely not as quick as the former train line, but probably more profitable to operate.

That brings us back to the Bruck in the present day. Clearly, cargo was given more importance in this distinctive compromise-mobile. It wouldn’t be too long before many less traveled passenger train lines themselves took on a similar arrangement, with passengers relegated to a few cars at the back of a freight train before being discontinued entirely.

We know it was in the process of restoration circa 2000. It looks a bit rough on closer inspection, having spent nearly as long sitting outdoors since then as it spent abandoned after being decommissioned. Still, the restoration has held up well. Presumably, someone from the historical society comes by every now and again to clean it.

For all of the elaborate one-off commercial vehicles we have admired here at CC, the reality is that such ornamentation costs money. Railways aren’t known for their extravagance, so the only intentional aesthetic elaboration the Bruck received were these four chrome strips. Everything else was simple, cheaply painted metal.

The adjacent Whitefish Station does embody some of the glitz and glamor of the golden age of rail travel. Built in 1921, it channels some of the adventurous spirit of the famous Lake McDonald Lodge in Glacier Park, Montana, where doubtless many passengers who disembarked here later traveled to. The famous 1935-1939 Red Jammer busses that still service Glacier are as beautifully detailed as you would have expected from such surroundings, in stark contrast to our featured bus.

Back to the wonderfully utilitarian Bruck, I couldn’t leave things off without mentioning the Ford Model A parked next to it. The Hertz connection is as mysterious to me as it is to you.

What do you think of this brick of a bus doubling as a truck?