In 1924 the Detroit United Railway (DUR) Company, an electric interurban rail carrier, formed a highway-coach subsidiary, then named as the People's Motor Coach (PMC) Company, to enable its parent firm to reduce its operating costs and to enhance its competitive position against an increasing number of rivals operating buses on the improving roads.
[The route segment between Louisville and Cincinnati had come from the Southland Transportation Company, which Harris Spearin, with the backing and financing of Wickman in Minnesota, had founded in 1925, after (in 1923) he sold his White Bus Lines, running three routes based in Duluth, Minnesota, to Wickman's Mesaba Motors Company (a predecessor of the Motor Transit Corporation, which in 1929 became renamed as The Greyhound Corporation – with an uppercase T, because the word "the" was an integral part of the legal name of the corporate entity).]
[The seller of the Sunny South Lines was Walter Nisun, who had founded it, and who later (about 1934) sold to the Pennsylvania GL another of his properties, running between Detroit and Saint Louis (in Missouri) via Fort Wayne and Indianapolis.]
The Ohio GL continued to increase its route network throughout the Buckeye State, mostly by the acquisition of pre-existing carriers.
In 1945 The Greyhound Corporation bought a controlling (majority) interest in the Cincinnati and Lake Erie (C&LE) Transportation Company, which had begun in 1923 as the highway-coach subsidiary of the Cincinnati and Lake Erie (C&LE) Railroad, an electric interurban railway in western Ohio, which had ended its rail operations in 1939.
Shortly afterward the Eastern Wisconsin concern became sold again – to an electric interurban railway and later (the last time) to the Northland GL.
That design, with only slight modifications (mostly in the inscription), became the pattern for shoulder patches on the uniforms for drivers throughout the entire Greyhound system, and it continued as such until late in the 1980s.
In 1927 the Safety Motor Coach Lines introduced overnight service between Chicago and Muskegon, during an era while nighttime long-distance highway running was still a rarity.
It was agreed that, over time, the acquired lines operating under MTC would adopt the Greyhound name and paint scheme.
During that era many bus companies used the names of animals, often coupled with the names of colors, by which to refer to the buses, the companies, or both (such as Cardinal, Oriole, Blue Goose, Purple Swan, Blue Bird, Eagle, Jackrabbit, and Thorobred) along with colored objects (such as Red Ball, Green Line, Gold Seal, White Star, Silver Line, and Red Arrow) – and, inevitably perhaps, Greyhound.
[Ekstrom is said to have proposed the use of the name of the Greyhound Lines even before he left Wisconsin (with the support of his associates in Minnesota) to go eastward.]
In 1928 the MTC bought the Southwestern Michigan Motor Coach Company, which had recently become formed, to acquire most of the routes of the Shore Line Motor Coach Company (a subsidiary of an Insull railway property) to the east of Gary, a suburb of Chicago in the northwest corner of Indiana, consisting of the route between Chicago and Detroit via Kalamazoo (in Michigan), an alternate one between Chicago and Grand Rapids via Benton Harbor, and one between South Bend (in Indiana) and Detroit (which extended and made connections with a railway route, which still operates, now under the name of the South Shore Line, between Chicago and South Bend).
Starting in 1935, the (third) Central GL (the CGL of Michigan) and then soon (in 1936) the undenominated main (second) Central GL operated all the Greyhound routes in Michigan, including the heavy traffic between Chicago and Detroit, as well as the likewise heavy mainline traffic between Chicago and New York City via Cleveland (in Ohio), including the route via Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse, and Albany (all four in the Empire State), paralleling the touted "water-level route" of the New York Central (railway) System.
In 1947 The Greyhound Corporation finished reacquiring the remaining shares of the non-voting stock in the Central GL which (in 1935) it had transferred to the NYC System.
No longer having a need to maintain a subsidiary coinciding with the territory of that railway firm, Greyhound next reorganized some of its routes in the Midwest and the Northeast, seeking a more efficient operation.
The new division, the Great Lakes GL, took over all the coaches of both previous Great Lakes firms (that is, both the GLGL and the GLGL of Indiana, both the main firm and the Indiana subsidiary) plus all the coaches previously assigned to the Michigan routes of the (second) Central GL.
In 1987 The Greyhound Corporation (the original parent Greyhound firm), which had become widely diversified far beyond transportation, sold its entire highway-coach operating business (its core bus business) to a new company, named as the Greyhound Lines, Inc., called also GLI, based in Dallas, Texas – a separate, independent, unrelated firm, which was the property of a group of private investors under the promotion of Fred Currey, a former executive of the Continental Trailways (later renamed as the Trailways, Inc., called also TWI, also based in Dallas), which was by far the largest member company in the Trailways association.
The lenders and the other investors of the GLI ousted Fred Currey as the chief executive officer (CEO) after the firm went into bankruptcy in 1990.