Some Of The Wildest Buses On Earth Have Six-Foot Tires, Six-Wheel Drive, And Take 72 Feet To Make A Turn

Throughout automotive history, there have been times when someone felt a need to carry dozens of people through some of the harshest environments on Earth. Maybe you run a mining company and need to transport workers, or perhaps you need to transport explorers and researchers by land. If you happen to find yourself exploring a Canadian glacier or Antarctica, chances are you might ride in a Foremost Terra bus. These giant buses can transport 56 people across ice and negotiate up to 60 percent road grades, and they’re so ridiculous that they have a turning radius of 72 feet.

According to Atlas Obscura, the most famous Terra Bus, ‘Ivan’ the Terra Bus has finally been retired after 30 years serving the McMurdo Sound in Antarctica. For three decades, the gigantic 46-foot-long, 12.5-foot-wide, and 14-foot-tall bus gave a warm welcome to scientists arriving in the icescape. Everything about Ivan and its Foremost-built siblings is insane, from its six-foot diameter tires and six-wheel-drive to its 66,000-pound gross weight rating. The Terra Bus is an enduring design too, with few visual changes over several decades in existence.

Why does a bus like this exist? The Foremost Terra Bus, which is still in production, is a highly niche sort of vehicle. It’s the kind of thing you might find yourself riding in if no mere Prevost is going to get you to your destination.

From Canada With Love

Of course, like so many of history’s great winter vehicles, the Terra Bus is a product of Canada. Foremost, the builder of the Terra Bus, gives some insight into its history:

Bruce Nodwell (May 12, 1914 – January 20, 2006) was a Canadian inventor who invented the Nodwell 110, a multi-purpose two-tracked vehicle capable of traversing a wide variety of adverse terrain, including sand, mud, muskeg, swamp, and snow. In 1947, Imperial Oil made the Leduc No. 1 discovery in Alberta and the economy began to rapidly expand. As the oil exploration moved northward from the Leduc region, the oil men soon encountered muskeg, a wet, boggy, swamp-like matter through which conventional equipment could not pass. Even WWII tracked equipment could not handle the requirement or they did not have sufficient load capacities.

Imperial Oil asked Bruce Nodwell to construct two vehicles they had designed to try to provide mobility over muskeg. These vehicles were unsuccessful, but Bruce had become aware of the need for large tracked vehicles. His first designs, that were to be either tracked or wheeled, were called North Kings and 16 were sold, but even they did not have enough mobility or durability. Bruce then concentrated on a vehicle design using soft tracks and single rows of wheels to support them.

In 1955, Bruce’s invention of the double sprocket made it possible to drive wide tracks and also keep them in place while using a single row of wheels. The combination of the splice in the belt and the double sprocket allowed the use of any size or shape belt the vehicles needed. The “wide track” concept was born. They were now able to build a new and different type of machine.

Foremost says this new technology was used to create the Tracked Truck, but it gained the nickname of “Nodwell,” leading to Nodwell just renaming the truck to the Nodwell 110. Canada was slow to adapt, but eventually, over 1,500 of these tracked vehicles were deployed, making the company rather well-known. Nodwell 110s have conquered terrain all over the world, from Alaska and Russia to Iran and South America.

Eventually, Bruce Nodwell would diversify and then leave this company, deciding to start another with his son, Jack, in 1965.

As for the name, apparently Jack Nodwell couldn’t choose the family name for the company because other companies had already taken it. Bruce decided to name the company after early Canadian towns, settling on Foremost Industries, named after the small town in Southern Alberta.

Foremost says it developed an improvement on an old concept in the 1970s when it built a tracked bus for Brewster Sightseeing, a company with a history of Canadian scenic tours dating back to 1892. Tracked buses have been a famed part of Canadian automotive history, and Foremost scaled up the old tracked people carrier concept and added safety equipment to make them better to carry tourists, as Brewster wanted.

The Terra Bus

In 1981, Foremost then took the concept even further for Brewster Sightseeing. Most of Brewster’s buses were regular coach buses, but the tour company needed something extreme for its Glacier Tours for tourists visiting the Columbia Ice Fields in Jasper, Alberta. Brewster’s tour bus needed not only to be able to survive the elements, but also to climb ridiculously steep grades.

The Terra Bus was built to meet that demand. The first example, Brewster fleet number 528, featured a Detroit Diesel 6V92TA 9.05-liter V6 two-cycle diesel making 253 HP. It also featured gigantic balloon tires that put only 15 psi of pressure on the ground, six-wheel drive, and a Clark 34600 Series Power Shift transmission. These buses were basically low-range only and had a top speed of just 25 mph or just 11 mph when traversing the Athabasca Glacier. Foremost built these coaches to handle as high as 60 percent straight grades or 30 percent side grades, too.

Brewster quickly added 23 more Terra Buses to its fleet, starting after the first was delivered in 1981. Most of these buses, named Ice Explorers by Brewster, came from the factory with a Detroit Diesel Series 50 8.5-liter four-cylinder four-stroke diesel making 250 HP. Other specifications were otherwise the same with the subsequent buses featuring Clark 34600 transmissions, a 25 mph top speed, and similar grade performance. The Terra Buses were even able to ford water that was nearly four feet deep.

Driving.ca also noted the magic of the Terra Bus. These things weighed 55,115 pounds empty, yet consumed only 2.5 gallons of diesel per hour. The gigantic balloon tires also meant that the Terra Buses didn’t absolutely tear apart the terrain as they explored glaciers.

A report at Atlas Obscura alleges that the largest 56-passenger version of the Terra Bus took 160 feet, or the width of a football field, to complete a U-turn, while most other reports say that the average Terra Bus could complete a turn in 72 feet. Either way, a Terra Bus is not an agile vehicle.

Terra Buses have proven largely reliable, too. Sadly, in 2020, one Ice Explorer vehicle suffered from a rollover crash after it allegedly exceeded its lateral slope gradeability by four percent during one tour trip. The structure of the bus remained intact, but passengers didn’t have seatbelts and the driver allegedly wasn’t wearing theirs. Several people suffered from serious injuries while three others suffered from fatal injuries. In the wake of the crash, Brewster paid penalties, installed passenger seatbelts in its Terra Buses, and mandated that drivers wear their belts as well.

The Most Famed Terra Bus

But the Terra Bus would have a greater claim to fame than just carting around tourists. If such an extreme vehicle was good for Canada, it was also a decent pick for scientists in Antarctica. Car and Driver talks about how crazy driving is there:

It’s the highest, driest, coldest, windiest, and emptiest place on earth. Ninety-eight percent of it is covered by ice, and at its deepest point, that ice is nearly three miles thick. It encompasses 5.4 million square miles of space, or almost two million square miles more than the continental United States. The mean annual temperature at its most populous outpost is a whopping 0 degrees Fahrenheit, and a South Pole winter can produce temperatures 100 degrees below that. Until being sighted in 1820–21, its existence was only a hypothesis, the stuff of cartographers’ fever dreams.

And now people drive there.

At the risk of understatement, Antarctica is a hell of a place for a car. It’s also a hell of a long way from anything else—McMurdo Station, the main U.S. ice station on the continent, is 2415 miles from the nearest populated city, which happens to be in New Zealand, which itself is a long way from anything. Getting a vehicle, let alone a person, to Antarctica requires careful timing, good weather, heaps of preparation, and several very long flights. And because conditions are so harsh, driving there is like driving on the moon. Maybe colder.

Car and Driver notes that while most people will get around Antarctica by air, there is often a need to get people around on the ground, and that’s when extreme vehicles come in. A Terra Bus arrived in McMurdo Sound in 1994 via cargo ship to aid the two-decade-old transport vehicles the U.S. Navy had there since the 1970s.

Ivan the Terra Bus had a pretty simple job. It had to be the world’s most extreme airport shuttle bus. Atlas Obscura has a funny story about where the name came from:

Antarctic veterans remember the contest that was held among McMurdo residents to name the bus when it arrived. Roy Harrison, a mechanic, remembers being disappointed that his own suggestion, “Magic Bus” (in honor of the song by The Who) wasn’t chosen. The winning name “Ivan the Terra Bus,” was, of course, a reference to Ivan the Terrible, legendary medieval tsar of Russia; there’s also the happy coincidence that “Terra Bus,” the name that the Canadian manufacturer Foremost gave the model in 1981, sounds very much like a pun on the two Ross Island mountains that rise above McMurdo Station—Mount Erebus and Mount Terror. Those mountains were named after the two ships that first explored the regions, HMS Terror and Erebus (more famous, perhaps, for later being lost in the Arctic with John Franklin’s doomed expedition).

Ivan joined an incredible fleet that, as of 2011, contained 130 snowmobiles, 90 light trucks and vans, 52 tracked snow vehicles, 45 wheeled loaders, 30 tracked tractors, and 28 heavy trucks. This part of the world is so remote and so desolate that everyone has to do their part to help produce energy, heat, and water. All of these vehicles help keep this pocket of civilization going.

It’s also noted that those light vehicles aren’t exactly run-of-the-mill trucks and vans. The vans are jacked up sky-high and have 40-inch beadlock tires with pressures turned down really low. In a way, these things operate like miniature versions of Ivan.

All of this is to aid the residents of the station. America is there in part because of the U.S. National Science Foundation’s (NSF) U.S. Antarctic Program, which had a scientific purpose, from NSF:

The U.S. Antarctic Program (USAP), managed by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), supports scientific research and education in Antarctica — Earth’s highest, driest, coldest, windiest and most remote continent. USAP operates three year-round research stations and a research vessel, collaborating with federal agencies, the U.S. military and civilian contractors to provide essential logistical and operational support.

The Atlas Obscura story notes that Ivan was never the fastest vehicle on the ice — the bus took an hour to get people from the airport — but it was the old and reliable beast that got through almost anything that rendered other vehicles stuck. It was also famous from the moment it got off of the boat, as Ivan’s first driver accidentally dented the vehicle’s rear bumper while reversing. That damage was never repaired.

Since then, it sounded like everyone getting off a plane and onto Ivan has a story to tell. Stickers adorn Ivan’s wooden interior, and some corrosion shows three decades of a hard life. Much like how some folks couldn’t picture America’s cityscapes without iconic Ford Crown Victoria taxis or Checker cabs, some can’t see Antarctica without the big red bus that required a ladder to get into and an engine warmup sequence as long as an hour. Watch Ivan in action:

Unfortunately, time had become Ivan’s worst enemy. Foremost is still building the Terra Bus, and it looks pretty much the same after over four decades of production. Foremost has changed the windows, and the buses are now powered by 330 HP Mercedes-Benz 240 diesels; some others got Mercedes-Benz 4R/6R 1000 series engines, good for 280 HP. There’s also now a shorter 36-passenger variant. But that’s about it. Most Terra Buses are still running those old Detroit Diesels, and the change to Mercedes diesel power will be their first engine upgrade in decades.

As Atlas Obscura notes, some of Ivan’s parts have been discontinued, requiring special manufacturing to replace or repair. The costs to keep the vintage bus going just kept racking up, which is bad during a time when, as Atlas Obscura notes, USAP could see budget cuts in this new wild political world.

Thankfully, fans saved Ivan, and the bus is headed to Christchurch, New Zealand, where it might end up in a museum.

The awesome thing is that you can still take a ride in the other Terra Buses. If you take a trip up to the great lands of Canada, you can still ride in any one of Brewster’s 21 Terra Buses. At current rates, a Brewster tour on a Terra Bus would run you about 80 of your U.S. dollars, so not bad at all!

The Terra Buses are things of wonder, just like those extreme Torsus buses are. Take a simple concept and crank it up to the extreme, and you get buses meant to carry dozens of people around the harshest environments. All of these buses are awesome examples of using engineering to solve problems, and I love that they’ve seen minimal changes after so many decades. If it’s not broken, right? One day I absolutely plan on getting you a firsthand report of one of these beasts.

Hat tip to Nic!