The North America Railway Hall of Fame in Canada inducted Perley A. Thomas for his contributions to building streetcars, which lead to the creation of Thomas Built Buses.

Thomas was honored in the North America Railway Worker category on June 18 at the Canada Southern Railway Station in St. Thomas, Ontario.

In 1910, he became the chief engineer at Southern Car Company in High Point, N.C., a leading streetcar manufacturer of the day. By 1916, the company went out of business in response to economic woes created by World War I, but within a few months, the Southern Public Utilities Company asked him to form a crew to renovate streetcars he had designed for Southern Car Company. The result was Perley A. Thomas Car Works.

By the mid-1930s, the streetcar business gave way to bus production, specifically school buses. Thomas continued on as a design consultant until his death in 1958 at age 84. The company became Thomas Built Buses in 1972, and it became a wholly-owned subsidiary of Freightliner LLC in 1998.

“One of the things that we are very proud of here at Thomas Built Buses is our heritage,” said Kelley Platt, CEO and president of Thomas Built Buses. “We will continue to support the Thomas tradition in ways that we hope would make Perley Thomas and the Thomas family proud.”