Here’s an inside look at Blue Bird’s school bus assembly and parts fabrication operations in Fort Valley, Ga., which SBF visited recently.
Virtual Tour: Blue Bird’s Fort Valley Facilities
Blue Bird employees weld flooring for a school bus at the company's main facility in Fort Valley, Ga.
Side panels and rub rails are installed.
Blue Bird has a total workforce of about 1,500 people. Here, a plant employee places rivets in a side panel.
A bus gets a yellow coat inside a paint booth.
A bus body, now mounted on a chassis, moves along the assembly line. The Fort Valley facility builds both Type D (seen here) and Type C buses.
Jay Jones, Blue Bird’s corporate chaplain, provides a variety of services for staff members and their families, including voluntary chapel services, counseling and hospital visits.
At Blue Bird South, the company fabricates the manufacturing materials for its buses: seat frames (pictured here), steps, sheet metal panels, bumpers, etc.
Body bows are installed on a Blue Bird bus.
Flooring and windows are installed.
A line of Cummins engines await installation in Blue Bird buses.
Inside a Blue Bird paint booth, a bus body gets a coat of black paint before the more prominent school bus yellow.
On display in the Fort Valley facility is a replica of Blue Bird No. 1, the company’s first school bus, which was built in 1927. The bus was mounted on a Ford Model T chassis, and it included a solid, one-piece roof bow design.
Also on display is Blue Bird’s first All American Type D school bus, which was built in 1948.
Also in Fort Valley, just a few miles down the road from Blue Bird’s main facility, is the company’s fabrication plant, Blue Bird South.
A worker welds a sidewall panel at Blue Bird South.