Trailways Terminal
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The Trailways Bus Station was located at 12th. Street and 4th.
Avenue
in Huntington. Its is now the location of Dan's Sport Shop.
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HUNTINGTON - In 1953, Greyhound Lines opened a new bus terminal at 4th Avenue
and 13th Street,
a handsome Art Deco design widely used by the bus line in
cities across the nation.
Today the former Greyhound terminal is owned and operated by the Tri-State
Transit Authority (TTA),
with Greyhound using it as a tenant. The TTA needed
to move its busiest downtown bus stop to an off-street
facility and Greyhound, operating only a fraction of the busy schedule it once offered in West
Virginia,
no longer needed such a large terminal. "It was a perfect marriage
for both of us," Vicki Shaffer,
then TTA's general manager, said of the
terminal's 1994 purchase.
Greyhound service in the Huntington area can be traced back to the 1920s, when
Arthur M. Hill merged two
small regional bus lines into what he first called
the Midland Trail Transit Co. and later the Blue and
Gray Transit Co. In 1931,
it became part of the Greyhound system.
Hill's original Huntington terminal was on 9th Street between 2nd and 3rd
avenues. Next, the terminal moved to the
Hines Building in the 900 block of
5th Avenue. Later, the old Lyric Theater in the 800 block of 4th Avenue
was
remodeled as a terminal. Still later both Greyhound and its rival, Continental Trailways, operated out of
Huntington's old Baltimore & Ohio Railroad
passenger station, which today is home to the
Cabell-Huntington Convention and
Visitors Bureau.
When Greyhound built its new terminal, Trailways moved to a former garage just
one block away,
at 4th Avenue and 12th Street. Trailways shut its doors there
in 1974. Today,
the vastly remodeled building houses a sporting goods store.
Trailways next briefly used the Greyhound terminal, then a building at 5th
Avenue and 28th Street
before discontinuing its Huntington service in 1984.
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Note: This Article and picture appeared in the Herald-Dispatch Newspaper on Dec. 21 , 2015
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