Mirror photo by Gary M. Baranec Four of Amtran’s nine GMC New Look buses sit parked in a lot. Nicknamed “Fishbowls,” the transportation company recently retired the buses, making arrangements for museums to take six of them, while the remaining three will be auctioned off.

“Living in a fishbowl” is a metaphor for being on public display.

Amtran, which owns nine 40-year-old GMC New Look “Fishbowl” buses that it recently retired, was planning to retain one of them for occasional excursion service — and public display.

But organizational leaders have put that idea on the shelf after making arrangements with museums to take six of the nine Fishbowls.

The museums’ intervention allowed Amtran to look at retention from another angle.

“We realized we don’t have to save one” because the museums would do the job of preservation, said Amtran General Manager Eric Wolf. “It (would have been) too big an expense and too much drain on resources (anyway),” Wolf stated.

The museums are the American Industrial Mining Co. Museum, Buckeye Lake, Ohio; the Classic Bus Owners Association, Bronx, N.Y.; the Commonwealth Coach and Trolley Museum, Roanoke, Va.; the New Jersey Transportation Heritage Center, Scotch Plains, N.J.; the Museum of Bus Transportation, Harrisburg; and the Trolley Museum of New York, Kingston, N.Y., according to an Amtran news release.

The other three Fishbowls will be auctioned to the highest bidders on the public surplus website from Aug. 15 through Aug. 31, according to the news release.

Those three are useful mostly for parts, the news release stated.

Amtran first used Fishbowls in 1968, when it bought 17 new ones.

Because of their “outstanding reliability,” it bought 15 used ones from Harrisburg from 1989-93.

It bought 16 additional Fishbowls from Montgomery, Ala., from 2001-03.

The nine remaining are among those from Montgomery.

Amtran officials have been told that the local organization was the last in the U.S. to run the buses in revenue service.

In recent years, the Fishbowls were “school trippers” for the Altoona Area School District, last operating on June 1.

The New Looks are nicknamed “Fishbowls” because of their curved, six-piece windshield, according to the news release.