by Ryan Vagabundo
What if I told you that in America, just a short year ago, there was once a bus service that did all of the following:
Bans "social justice warriors" and "illegal immigrants" from riding, in the latter case threatening to report them to immigration authorities if they dare to buy a ticket
Bans anyone age 18-35 enrolled in any kind of school, and anyone who works for any kind of place of higher education
Bans anyone who doesn't speak English
Bans anyone that weighs more than 250 lbs.
A dress code that includes "no baggy pants" among its items
Threatens to levy a $100,000 fine (not a typo, $100k) to anyone who smokes at a bus stop ... even though all the stops are a mix of public land and private land that the bus company doesn't own
Forbids taking pictures of the bus with any kind of Instagram filters or adding anything "defamatory"
And what if, in addition to all of these fine features, the official bus slogan promised to "Make Motorcoaches Great Again" and used a variation of an outdated German flag known to be associated with neo-Nazi groups as its logo? And named its flagship vehicle the "Barry Goldwater Express?"
Some people of the more extreme right-wing persuasion might be stoked to hear all this, but I'm guessing it would be off-putting to most. Yet, this fever dream of a bus service apparently managed to make at least one run before going out of business.
This is the wild and completely unique tale of the Inland Streamliner.
A New Challenger Appears
Inland Streamliner would eventually cause a minor stir in various local newspapers in Nevada, but I happened to notice it before all that.
Sometime in early 2019 I was checking up on the status of the former Greyhound line that ran directly between Reno and Las Vegas. This line only existed from about 2015 to 2018, and was eventually suspended because a federal rural transportation grant it was relying on was not renewed. There had been some talk about it eventually getting underway again, but at that point it was still out of service.
A direct bus between Reno and Vegas is a big deal to Nevada travelers for a couple of reasons. One is that all other existing bus service forces you to take a massive detour through either Utah or California, adding nearly a full day of travel onto what should be a roughly nine-hour drive. Going through Utah adds much more time but is safer in the winter, because going through California means traversing mountain roads that are often shut down due to snow and ice during the winter. The other factor is that there is no other inter-city bus service available in small central Nevada cities like Tonopah, Fallon, Fernley and Pahrump.
So anway, the Greyhound line no longer existed but a new bus service was popping up on Google Maps - "Inland Streamliner." A little quick Googling revealed this mysterious new bus had a website!
It appeared to be a legitimate operation, not up and running until summer of 2019 but already taking advance bookings. The daily service would run not just between Vegas and Reno, but down to Phoenix as well.
I don't remember exactly what prompted me to click on the site's "Contract of Carriage" page. I may have just been picking around the site hoping to learn more about exactly when service was supposed to start. But that page, which has been partially archived by a reporter from the Reno Gazette-Journal, was where all the "interesting" terms and conditions listed above were found.
Reddit Gets Involved
At this point, I wrote the service off as either an elaborate troll or some sort of scam attempt and put it out of mind. That is, until I happened to see a news article about its woes that summer.
The reporting apparently stemmed from people on Reddit stumbling into the same stuff I did at some point. Posts to both the Reno and Vegas local subreddits uncovered all sorts of new and fascinating details in how this apparent Nazi bus line came to be.
The shortest possible version is this: random guy owns a Streamline commercial coach that he's using for camping and traveling the West, gets the bright idea to start his own Greyhound equivalent service on this recently abandoned route between Reno and Vegas, but has literally no clue about pretty much any aspect of establishing and running a transportation business and doesn't bother to learn most of the particulars before jumping into business with both feet. In spite of his seeming total lack of knowledge of interstate regulations, insurance requirements, discrimination laws, and so on, he decided to just press on and take ticket money and let the chips fall where they may. And somehow this all managed to rattle to a maiden voyage on July 5.
Back to the Beginning
("Swadians" are apparently something from the game Mount And Blade. I don't understand this reference, but maybe you will.)
The owner of the company, John Wang, can be found posting as "SwadianH" or "Swadian Hardcore" at all sorts of sites all over the internet. He scrubbed his Reddit history, but a trail of posts indicate that he is some sort of big-time bus and train enthusiast who acquired his own Streamliner at some point around 2017 and was using it for personal travel before getting the idea to go into the carriage business.
Scrubbed posts from Reddit and a still-existent post history on AmtrakTrains indicates that this wasn't a scam, he was actually serious about it and was even putting out want ads for drivers at a number of sites (and even hired a couple).
The big problem here is just a staggering case of "how did you not know ... ?" to the approach. John seemingly knew absolutely nothing at all about business or the particulars of running a motorcoach service. His approach seemed to be to just bulldoze through everything until hitting some sort of resistance, then hacking around that resistance in the quickest and cheapest way possible. He seemed to either not know or not care about all sorts of laws and regulations and was going to merrily ignore them until forcibly confronted with them.
Idiots try to start "businesses" in this haphazard way and fall on their faces all the time, but the thing that makes the story remarkable is how far he got in spite of this total lack of awareness or due diligence. The website went up and tickets were sold before he even had all sorts of necessary fundamentals in place. He didn't seem to know he had to be insured properly or registered with the Department of Transportation and the Federal Motor Coach Safety Organization until people on forums started calling him out for it. Nor did he seem to be aware that he had to actually get permission from the places he was planning on stopping to stop there, which in some cases would require local permits. Same with not knowing that he needed a business license in each state he'd be operating in - he filed for the Nevada one the same day that a Reddit user called him out for it.
This is all before we even get to the Nazi imagery, 4chan memes and absolute buffet of discrimination law violations that constituted the original version of the website and the "contract of carriage."
And all this for one used bus that would be making daily trips through very long stretches of remote desert.
Did It Really Ever Actually Run?
The only source I can find indicating the bus ever actually ran is a Daily Beast report stating that the Inland Streamline made its maiden voyage on July 5 of 2019. However, the only source of this seems to be quotes from John Wang himself. No pictures, no testimonials from customers, no really good evidence to indicate that this trip ever actually happened. It was supposed to make its first trip on July 3, but apparently failed a safety inspection (again, on Wang's word) at the last possible minute and left five passengers who had bought tickets online stranded.
By August 21 of 2019 the company was formally out of business. I can't find any pictures anywhere of the bus actually in operation carrying passengers, just shots of it empty while in garages and parked on random streets.
Is The Story Really Over?
Here's the kicker, and I haven't seen this reported anywhere else yet - the Inland Streamliner is still at it. Yes, this Quixotic operation has not gone quietly into the good night just yet.
Wang appears to have surrendered the idea of the Reno-Vegas-Phoenix route. However, very recent postings on AmtrakTrains indicate that he's trying to get a Reno-Portland route that caters to gamblers going.
You know what, if the guy learns from all of his (many) mistakes, somehow secures adequate capital (in a legal way) and comes up with a sound business plan, then God bless him. However, it's real hard not to look at the wreckage of what happened and believe that this ends any other way but the government shutting it down or it getting sued into oblivion in record time after various mishaps.