Capable of traveling on road or rail, the Evans Auto-Railer offered one possible solution to America’s transportation needs in the Thirties.

With headquarters in the elegant Union Guardian Building in downtown Detroit and factories in Plymouth, Michigan and elsewhere, the Evans Products Company was a diverse enterprise that manufactured everything from railroad cars to tricycles. In that regard the company was much like its founder and chief executive Edward S. Evans, a Motor City inventor and businessman whose interests were equally diverse, from aviation to wood processing. (Evans Products manufactured the famed Eames molded plywood chairs.) His son, Robert B. Evans, would later become a major shareholder and chairman of American Motors.

One development aggressively promoted by the company in the mid-1930s was a passenger bus called the Auto-Railer, which was designed to travel on the highway or on standard-gauge railroad track. The product was a natural progression for Evans, which also produced a utility truck along the same lines, as well as the drop-down auxiliary chassis setups to convert road vehicles to railroad travel (often known as hi-rail equipment).

The cutaway illustration above pretty much gives away the story: Underneath the futuristic, streamlined body, the Auto-Railer passenger bus was essentially a standard Chevrolet truck chassis with a six-cylinder engine in the front and tandem-axle suspension in the rear. The reasoning behind the hybrid road/rail vehicle is self-evident. In areas that could not support both railway and highway passenger service, the Auto-Railer could serve both functions. While the Auto-Railer was not produced in large numbers, evidently, the company did enjoy some success with the product, with several transport lines on the East Coast putting them to use.

Finally, below we have a 1935 newsreel feature from Chevrolet Leader News showing the Auto-Railer in use in the Jackson, Michigan area. The film shows off a few of the Auto-Railer’s advantages—including the ability to stop in a reasonable distance, something a conventional rail car can’t do. Video below. (Please take a moment to click and subscribe to our YouTube channel, where we host our videos for the website and feature lots of great vintage automotive content. This helps to keep us in business. Thanks!)